NB – Before reading any further, please note that ALL of the anaconda-encoiled animal photographs and anaconda-encoiled mechanical device photographs contained in this article are photo-manipulated FAKES (with the sole exception of the anaconda-encoiled white cow photos), so none of the apparent animal ‘victims’ in these photos were victims (except for the white cow, but it did survive – see later).

The internet is increasingly a limitless source not only of fake news but also of fake photographs, with animal subjects being particularly popular.

I was recently sent for my opinion as to its veracity what initially looked like an exceedingly unpleasant, tragic photograph of a lion roaring wildly as it struggled impotently to escape the crushing coils of what seemed to be a gigantic python coiled tightly around its body. Here is the photo in question:

Fake, photo-manipulated photograph of a lion supposedly being crushed by a giant constricting snake – in reality, no lion was harmed whatsoever in the making of this picture! (source/creator presently unknown to me, but this fake photo is contained in numerous websites online)

A closer look, however, soon revealed a very different scenario. To begin with, I could readily see from its markings and colouration that the ‘python’ in question was actually a green anaconda Eunectes murinus, the largest and most familiar of the four anaconda species currently recognised by science. Bearing in mind that lions occur naturally in the wild state only in Africa and limited regions in Asia whereas all anacondas are entirely restricted in the wild state to tropical America, it was obvious, therefore, that if this photo were genuine, the grisly scene that it portrayed could only have occurred somewhere in captivity. Moreover, examining the image itself in enlarged form soon revealed that it was an inexpertly-produced example of photo-manipulation, with the edges of the anaconda’s coils in particular appearing far too sharp and crisp in comparison to the remainder of the image.

Consequently, I decided to conduct a Google-image search in an attempt to discover whatever original lion photo had been used in the creation of this fake version – and in less than 5 minutes I found it, contained in a fair few wildlife websites. Amusingly, it turned out that in the original photo the lion had been snapped in flagrante delicto with a lioness (which had been removed from the fake photo), thus explaining why it was roaring so energetically! (Incidentally, the fake lion/anaconda photo investigated here has been circulating online for a surprisingly long time – using TinEye’s Reverse Image Search, I was able to discover examples of it dating back as far as 6 February 2008.)

So in answer to my correspondent who sent me this lion/anaconda photograph for my opinion as to whether or not it was genuine: it’s not – the lion was lying, inasmuch as in the original, genuine photo its roars were telling a very different story from the one depicted in this fake version, in which the anaconda was most definitely a con.

While investigating this fake lion/anaconda photograph, I also encountered a short YouTube mini-investigation video that had been uploaded on 13 November 2015 by Cary Darling with the user name Hoax Factor (click hereto view it). In it, he begins by showing this same fake photo, which had been submitted to his Hoax Factor Facebook page by a reader called Chad, then after a fairly lengthy if light-hearted exposition he concludes his mini-video investigation of that photo by presenting the same original image of mating lions (albeit heavily pixellated) that I had independently discovered.

During my own researches, however, I was able to take this case further – much further, in fact – because it soon turned out that this fake lion/anaconda photograph was far from being unique. On the contrary, while pursuing it online in search of the original, genuine lion photo that has been used to create it, I swiftly discovered that a startling number and diversity of other fake anaconda-depicting photographs existed that featured a range of different ‘victim’ animals.

These include two other lion photos, two different tigers, two different jaguars, a black panther, cheetah, Alsatian dog, elephant, black-and-white cow, rabbit, and (inevitably) various versions featuring humans, as well as some mechanical items, such as a tractor and mechanical diggers or excavators, but all of them united by the presence of precisely the same anaconda coils and outstretched body.

These coils and/or body had been horizontally flipped in certain examples to give the false impression that it was a different specimen, and had occasionally been ‘enhanced’ by the crudely-achieved digital addition of fake wounds or blood. Moreover, some such photographs included more anaconda coils than others, but looking at these coils I immediately recognised from their markings and colouration that they were nothing more than identical, computer-generated replicates of the same single coil, these extra coils evidently having been digitally created and added in order to make the anaconda appear even longer than it already was. Here is a selection of some of the less lurid animal-featuring examples of these fake photos (there are undoubtedly many other variations upon this clichéd visual theme out there too):

Fake photographs featuring different animals encoiled by an anaconda, or mechanical devices bearing an anaconda, but all of them containing exactly the same original anaconda image, whose coils have sometimes been replicated digitally to make the anaconda seem longer (source/creator(s) presently unknown to me, but these fake photos are contained in numerous websites online)

And here are some of the fake photographs featuring encoiled mechanical devices:

Fake photographs featuring mechanical devices bearing an anaconda, but all of them containing exactly the same original anaconda image, whose coils have sometimes been replicated digitally to make the anaconda seem longer (source/creator(s) presently unknown to me, but these fake photos are contained in numerous websites online)

As the anaconda coils and body were identical in all of the above fake photos, it seemed pointless wasting time seeking out the original, genuine photo for each and every one of them (especially as the more I looked online, the more fakes using this same anaconda image I found), but I did devote a little time to tracing those that had been used to create some of the more dramatic fakes. So, for instance, click hereto view the original, genuine cheetah photo, hereto view the original, genuine (flipped) black panther photo, and herefor the original, genuine rabbit photo.

But that was not all. A second uniting factor was that all of these fake photographs were not only appearing in numerous websites but also turning up as introductory or profile pictures to videos that had been uploaded onto YouTube during the past couple of years or so, and by what appear to be a very sizeable number of users, judging from the number of different user names involved (but which, for all I know, may in reality all be one and the same person, or may at least be only a small number of persons but using a plethora of different user names).

And the third, key uniting factor was that not one of these fake introductory pictures actually appeared in the video that it was being used to introduce. In other words, based upon their graphic, sensationalised appearance, they were being used deliberately but dishonestly as click-bait, luring video viewers to watch the videos in order to see the action depicted in the photos, only to discover that no such action was contained in the videos.

(Having said that, and basing the following comment upon those specific examples viewed by me: what was contained in allof those videos introduced by one of the fake photos depicting the anaconda coiled around an animal was genuine, graphic video footage of animals being attacked and killed by constricting snakes, and sometimes by other animals too, each such video often comprising a compilation of several different, shorter video segments linked together, one after another, to yield a total video often lasting 10 minutes or more. In my opinion, this is nothing but gratuitous, sickening ‘video nasty’ sensationalism, and I therefore shall not be providing links to any of those videos here.)

All that remained for me to do now in order to bring this photo-detective investigation of mine to a successful close was to uncover the original, source photograph containing the anaconda and its coils that had been used to create all of the subsequent fake ones. So I conducted yet another, much lengthier Google search, but this time focusing upon the anaconda itself rather than upon the varied array of creatures or machinery that it was wrapped around in the series of fake photos that I had uncovered so far. To my great delight, I finally found it – and this is how.

First of all, I discovered a video that had been uploaded onto YouTube by someone with the user name GuruQA on 28 August 2015 (click here to view it). This video provided what turned out to be a major clue in relation to tracing the elusive original anaconda photograph.

Filmed in the wild in the anaconda’s native homeland, Brazil, it consists of a segment of amateur video footage (which I’ll refer to hereafter as AVS1) that begins with a split-second shot showing a woman with her back to the camera appearing at the right-hand edge of the screen. The camera then pans to a live white cow on the left-hand side of the woman, which is shown in its entirety, but once again only for just a split-second, lying down on all fours on some muddy grass, with a large anaconda coiled around its mid-body region. The camera then pans to the rear end of the cow’s body but still showing the anaconda’s coils, which can now be seen to be moving slightly. The anaconda then comes off the cow completely, followed immediately by the cow’s tail and hind feet kicking up dust at the extreme left-hand edge of the screen as the cow evidently makes a very swift exit; it does not appear anywhere in AVS1 again.

Meanwhile, AVS1 now reveals the presence of several people (their excited voices, speaking and shouting in Portuguese, could be heard from the very beginning of AVS1 but the people themselves had not been seen until now, with the sole exception of the one afore-mentioned woman), who make a cautious but ultimately successful attempt to pick up this very big snake, after which they walk away, carrying it aloft with them, and are shown taking it to a stretch of water into which they then release it. So we know that both the white cow and the anaconda ultimately survived.

Of especial note is that AVS1 includes a panning shot that directly links the anaconda moving off the cow (and the cow promptly fleeing) to the people beginning their attempt to pick it up, thereby establishing that AVS1 is indeed a single continuous segment, and not two separate ones spliced together.

The key element present in AVS1, however, is the brief appearance of the rear end of the cow with the anaconda still wrapped around its mid-body and moving – because during my earlier searches I had found online in a number of different websites a series of still photographs depicting a live white cow lying down on all fours on grass with an anaconda encoiled around its centre, and whose coils and body in one particular photograph within that series were identical to those featured in all of the fake photos. Moreover, these same white cow/anaconda photos appear at the very beginning of AVS1, directly before the video footage itself begins. Here is that one particular online white cow/anaconda photo (which I’ll refer to hereafter as the OWCA photo):

The OWCA photograph shown at the beginning of AVS1, and also found in various websites, depicting a white cow lying down on all fours with an anaconda wrapped around its mid-body(source/creator presently unknown to me)

Using TinEye’s Reverse Image Search, I was able to trace examples of the OWCA photo online dating back as far as 17 November 2013 (this latter, earliest online example of it can still be viewed, as the tenth of ten photos, here).

I then produced a screenshot of the brief footage in AVS1 showing the rear end of the cow lying down on all fours on grass with the anaconda’s slightly-moving coils still wrapped around its centre – and if you compare the cow’s rear end, the orientation of its visible hind leg, and the anaconda’s coils as seen in this video screenshot with those equivalent anatomical structures in the OWCA photograph found earlier by me online and also present at the beginning of AVS1, you will see that they unquestionably depict the same animals.

And now that this significant fact has been fully established, if you then view a second screenshot taken by me, capturing the split-second AVS1 footage of the encoiled cow as seen in its entirety this time (and occurring immediately before the footage of the cow’s rear end and the anaconda’s moving coils as captured in my first screenshot), even though the anaconda’s coils don’t move in this split-second earlier footage its screenshot provides further corroboration that the encoiled cow seen in AVS1 corresponds precisely with the encoiled cow seen in the OWCA photograph.

(Top) The OWCA photograph found by me online, depicting a white cow lying down on all fours on grass with an anaconda wrapped around its mid-body, and also shown at the beginning of AVS1; (Middle) My first video screenshot, of AVS1 footage showing the rear end of the white cow down on all fours on grass with the anaconda still wrapped around its centre and moving; (Bottom) My second screenshot, of AVS1footage showing the encoiled white cow in its entirety down on all fours on grass just a split-second before the footage captured in my first screenshot (source(s)/creator(s) of AVS1and the OWCA photograph presently unknown to me, but the OWCA photograph is contained in numerous websites online)

Clearly, therefore, alongside whoever filmed AVS1 was someone else who snapped some still photographs of the anaconda and its encoiled bovine victim – indeed, AVS1 actually shows a woman with a camera snapping photos of the anaconda – and it is one of these genuine photos, specifically the OWCA one reproduced by me above, that has subsequently been used by person(s) unknown to manufacture the startling array and diversity of fake photos revealed and exposed by me here in this ShukerNature blog article.

Summarising all of this: the above three images collectively confirm that the OWCA still photograph whose anaconda coils and body are identical to those in all of the fake photos presented here is itself genuine, not fake, because the animals in it correspond precisely in form and pose with those actually seen moving in video footage contained within AVS1.

Since discovering AVS1 as posted on YouTube by GuruQA in August 2015, plus the OWCA photo and others in that same online series, my path has once again crossed with that of Cary Darling, because I subsequently found out that another short Hoax Factor mini-investigation video uploaded by him on YouTube, this time on 15 December 2015 (click hereto view it), has also focused upon this same subject, and has actually included a clip from AVS1 (but he did not cite GuruQA or anyone else as his source for it) as well as the key OWCA photograph.

Crucially, however, although it has provided a most welcome service in drawing attention to the whole fake anaconda photos situation (and continues to do so), in my opinion the Hoax Factor mini-video does not provide an absolute guarantee from its clips alone that the specific cow/anaconda footage is a video, rather than merely a photograph. This is because AVS1’s brief but key footage showing the anaconda’s coils actually moving while wrapped around the cow is not included in the Hoax Factor mini-video. Equally, I personally feel that the latter mini-video does not provide unequivocal verification that the cow/anaconda footage and the anaconda/people footage are from the same video segment, because it does not include the specific footage from AVS1 that contains the all-important panning shot directly linking the cow/anaconda footage to the anaconda/people footage.

Conversely, by:

(a) my finding AVS1 as uploaded onto YouTube by GuruQA, and then specifically drawing attention here to both of those brief but all-important above-noted clips of footage contained in it that were not referenced in the Hoax factor mini-video; as well as:

(b) my highlighting the split-second footage in AVS1 that shows the encoiled cow in its entirety down on its knees on grass, then:

(c) my producing a screenshot of AVS1’s footage of the cow’s rear end that shows the moving anaconda coiled around the cow, and also my producing a screenshot of the split-second AVS1 footage that shows the encoiled cow in its entirety down on all fours on grass, and finally:

(d) my comparing those two separate AVS1-derived screenshots directly with the OWCA photograph containing the anaconda image that appears in all of the fake photos, I have been able to:

(e) confirm unequivocally that the OWCA photograph does indeed depict the same cow and anaconda that feature in AVS1’s cow/anaconda incident, and that:

(f) it is indeed, therefore, both genuine and the source of the anaconda image that appears in all of the fake photos.

(g) QED.

And so: although the perpetrator(s) of the fake photographs investigated by me exclusively in this ShukerNature blog article presently remain(s) unidentified, it is definitely safe to say that no lions, tigers, panthers, elephants, cows. rabbits, etc etc were harmed in the making of any of these images.

Thanks to some laborious but ultimately worthwhile and successful photo-detective work, another ostensibly complicated case, initially seemingly to be as encoiled as the anaconda featured within it, is duly unravelled and closed.

While conducting my researches relating to AVS1 as uploaded onto YouTube by GuruQA in August 2015 and showing the white cow/anaconda incident, I also discovered a second version of this segment (referred to hereafter by me as AVS2), which offered what may – or may not – be a very interesting additional insight into the videoed white cow/anaconda incident.

Uploaded onto YouTube by a user named Snake Channel on 9 January 2017 (viewable here), AVS2 cuts off abruptly at the end without showing the people actually releasing the anaconda into the stretch of water to which they had carried it after picking it up (as seen in AVS1). However, it includes some extra, earlier footage not seen in AVS1 and which is most intriguing.

AVS2 begins by showing some of the same photographs (including the OWCA photo) of the anaconda-encoiled white cow seen its entirety down on all fours on grass that were also shown at the very beginning of AVS1, after which it presents a short, narrated, professionally-made video section concerning anacondas in general that had seemingly been excerpted from a National Geographic documentary regarding this snake species (because the Nat. Geog’s famous yellow rectangle logo is superimposed upon the opening footage of this section).

This opening section then morphs into the first of two amateur video sections (referred to by me hereafter as S1 and S2 respectively). S1 shows an anaconda emerging from some reeds at the edge of an expanse of freshwater (river or lake) and coiling swiftly around an unsuspecting white cow standing in the water nearby. In just a very short time, the anaconda’s constricting actions appear to have rendered the cow at least unconscious, if not dead, because it soon lies motionless in the water. While this tragic scene plays out, the voices of S1’s film-maker and some other people present in this scene and speaking Portuguese (but not actually seen in it) call out loudly, seemingly attempting to frighten off the anaconda (but apparently forgetting or not realising that snakes are deaf to most airborne sounds).

S1’s footage then stops but new footage begins immediately, constituting S2, with the overlying title ‘An Hour Later’ appearing for a few moments. S2 turns out to be one and the same as AVS1, as uploaded by GuruQA, except that AVS1’s split-second clip panning from the woman on the right-hand-side of the screen to the anaconda-encoiled white cow seen in its entirety down on all fours on grass is not included in S2. Instead, S2 begins with the shot of the rear end of the anaconda-encoiled white cow, after which its footage is identical to that in AVS1 (except that, as noted earlier, it cuts off before the anaconda is released by the people into the stretch of water).

Screenshot from the beginning of S2 in AVS2 (creator of this video presently unknown to me – screenshot reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

The overlying title ‘An Hour Later’ appearing for a few moments at the beginning of S2 is clearly meant to demonstrate that S1 and S2 are merely two scenes from the same incident, shot an hour apart but featuring the same white cow and anaconda. If this is correct, it also means, therefore, that the cow was indeed merely unconscious, not dead, in the water during S1, and that during the intervening hour between the end of the events seen in S1 and those beginning in S2, the cow had been rescued and hauled out of the water onto the grass by the people heard in S1 and both heard and seen in S2.

However, I must confess that I am by no means convinced that S1 and S2 do indeed depict two different scenes from the same incident, wondering instead whether they actually depict two entirely unrelated incidents, featuring two different cows and two different anacondas. The reason for my personal misgivings is that in S1, within moments of being captured and encoiled by the anaconda the cow is lying face down, partly submerged, and entirely motionless in the water, looking very much as if it has drowned. Yet in S2 (uploaded in slightly longer form as AVS1 by GuruQA), the cow looks very much alive, and indeed, beats a hasty retreat as soon as the anaconda comes off it.

Fortunately, the question of whether or not S1 in AVS2 does indeed depict an earlier part of the incident depicted in S2 has no bearing upon my findings concerning the direct relevance of S2 (in its longer form as AVS1) to the subsequent creation by person(s) unknown of the various fake photographs exposed by me in this present ShukerNature article.

Several years before a certain music talent show of the same name first appeared on British television (in 2004, to be exact) and subsequently elsewhere around the world, a superb full-colour partwork magazine published by Marshall Cavendish Limited and devoted to mysteries of many kinds (but particularly strong on cryptozoology) was appearing each fortnight in shops throughout the UK and beyond. Eventually running to 96 issues, this excellent magazine’s title was The X Factor.

During its run, The X Factor published a number of cryptozoology-themed articles written by me, and also some interviews that I conducted with various fellow cryptozoologists and forteans. One of those interviews was with veteran British mystery cat investigator Trevor Beer (click here to read a transcript of it), another one was with mokele-mbembe seeker Prof. Roy Mackal (click here for a transcript). And in an enjoyable role-reversal, I was also interviewed myself for The X Factor, by CFZ founder Jonathan Downes, this interview subsequently appearing in issue #67.

The X Factor was a singularly authoritative, fact-filled publication, in many ways the natural successor to an equally significant, earlier partwork, The Unexplained, which was originally published during the early 1980s. Yet whereas the latter has been republished many times and in a number of different formats, The X Factor has never reappeared, tragically, in spite of its considerable popularity, so its contents are nowadays not as readily obtainable. As a result, I have been contacted on numerous occasions down through the years by correspondents and other readers lacking the X Factorissue in question (or the entire series), asking whether there was any possibility of reading Jon’s interview with me that featured in issue #67, way back in 1999.

Finally: Caveat lector – this interview was conducted back in 1999, since when I have read very extensively on the subject of the bigfoot in the USA, and have corresponded with many US bigfoot investigators and alleged observers, as a result of which I am nowadays far less sceptical than I previously was concerning this cryptid’s reality there.

In addition to the 25 (soon to be 26) books that I have written myself and seen published, I have also acted as a consultant and/or contributor to a further 17 (one in CD-ROM format) – click hereto access a (currently) complete listing of all of my books.

I am delighted to announce that the latest volume with which I have been involved in the dual capacity of consultant and contributor has now been published – Guinness World Records: Amazing Animals 2018. And here is a taster of what to expect:

Amazing animals – the fastest, tallest, strongest, strangest, coolest, most awesome animals in the world! Whether it’s a selfie-taking monkey, a skateboarding dog, a weasel flying on a woodpecker, surfing pigs, talking gorillas, the world’s largest elephant orchestra, a dog who thinks he’s Picasso, or a rabbit who plays basketball, the world can’t get enough of crazy animal stories, and Guinness World Records: Amazing Animals 2018 provides the perfect opportunity to celebrate the incredible creatures that steal our hearts! What’s inside? Animal superheroes, social media stars, peculiar pets, cute critters, wacky wildlife, and much more! And if it’s activities that you want, you’re in for a treat! Create your very own record-breaking animal with our online game, or try making an origami zoo! Test your wildlife knowledge with fun quizzes and puzzles, and find out if your pet is a secret Einstein with our exclusive IQ tests. Also containing hundreds of spectacular full-colour photographs, this fantastic, action-packed book will be a hit with children and animal lovers of all ages!

So, for a superlative showcase of the world’s greatest creatures, and a few LOLs along the way, get your paws on Guinness World Records: Amazing Animals 2018now – available from Amazon and all good bookstores everywhere! If you’re looking for an excellent Christmas present for someone who is fascinated by animals, look no further – here it is!

Full details can be found on this book’s dedicated page hereon my official website, which also contains direct clickable links to its page on the US and UK Amazon sites. It is available in both hard-copy and Kindle e-book format.

In June 2017, I was greatly saddened to lose one of my oldest and dearest friends in cryptozoology, when the award-winning Exmoor naturalist and veteran British mystery cat researcher Trevor Beer MBE, aged 80, passed away, following a short illness. Within the realm of cryptozoology, Trevor was well known and well respected in equal measure for his longstanding and outstanding Exmoor Beast investigations, his classic book on the subject, and his own significant, first-hand sightings of a very large black pantheresque cat on the moors, but in the wider world of Westcountry natural history he was an absolute colossus.

RIP Trevor, thank you for all of the exceptional work that you have done for wildlife and nature conservation down through many decades, for all of your delightful books and articles, and above all for your friendship, dating back more than 30 years. God speed, my friend, you will be sorely missed by so many souls, human and animal, but your magnificent achievements will live on forever as a wonderful testimony to you. If anyone wishes to seek Trevor’s monument, visit Exmoor and look around, and there you will see it, on every side, everywhere.

Commemorating Trevor’s life and works, I now have great pleasure in reprinting below, as my own personal tribute, an interview that I conducted with him on 8 March 1998 and which was subsequently published during 1999 inThe X Factor – a fortnightly partwork magazine published in the UK during the late 1990s, running to 96 issues in total, and devoted to mysteries of a great many kinds (but entirely unrelated, incidentally, to the somewhat laterTV music talent show of the same name).

Trevor Beer is a naturalist with a lifelong passion for wildlife conservation in his native Westcountry, especially Exmoor. He is a member of the Ministry of Defence’s Conservation Group and is the Army Ornithological Society’s Representative for Devon and Somerset. He won the coveted Gavin Maxwell Award for otter conservation in 1974, he owns a wildlife reserve in North Devon, and currently writes three regular nature columns for the Western Morning News, including his daily ‘Nature Notes’ and weekly ‘Countryside Matters’. He is also the author of several books, including Devon’s Mysterious Walks, Tarka Country, Poachers Days, and his most famous work, The Beast of Exmoor: Fact or Legend?

Trevor has been conducting extensive field research in the Westcountry concerning mysterious big cats for two decades, he can claim several sightings of such creatures, and is unquestionably Britain‘s most informed and respected field investigator of these animals.

(Above) An exquisite pen-and-ink illustration featuring a mystery black panther alongside various British dragon-related cryptids and legendary entities, which was very kindly drawn by Trevor specifically for inclusion in my book Dragons: A Natural History (1995).

The X Factor recently chatted with Trevor at his home in Barnstaple regarding his views and expectations relating to the ‘beastly’ feline phenomenon with which Exmoor and the Westcountry as a whole have been synonymous since the early 1980s.

Q1: When and why did you first take seriously eyewitness reports of mysterious big cats spied on Exmoor and elsewhere in Britain?

A1: I first took seriously eyewitness reports of mysterious big cats as long ago as 1967, when reports of pumas loose in the Westcountry appeared in the Western Morning News. The puma stories did not surprise me too much, as I knew people in North Devon had them as pets, at least three being kept by separate owners in the Barnstaple area where I live – the chances of occasional escapes not therefore being too surprising. I believe puma cubs could be obtained for around £30 each in those times, much less expensive, for example, than pedigree dogs.

However, from the early 1980s, following the now-famous, so-called ‘Beast of Exmoor’ tales, which included black big cats, I began my own investigations, simply because here was a new phenomenon, if you like – black big cats, as opposed to the usual, if varying, puma colours. My own first sighting of a black big cat, at Whitechapel, near the Drewstone site – which is the site that was made famous by the so-called sheep massacres in 1983 – convinced me that I was looking at a black leopard. And from then on I was rather hooked.

Q2: Do you believe that more than one species of mystery cat is being seen – and, if so, what do you think they may be, and how many different species do your researches suggest may be living in the Westcountry?

A2: I know there are both pumas and black leopards living in the wild on Exmoor and elsewhere in the Westcountry. I know that both have bred, with cubs seen on a few occasions. It is possible that a lynx or two are present in the wild too, and of course an Asian leopard cat Felis bengalensis was shot dead at Widecombe on Dartmoor in recent years. I also interviewed a fellow who told me he had released two jet-black African golden cats Felis aurataafter they grew from cubs in captivity and became difficult to keep. From personal experience, I’d say two species live in the wild in the Westcountry for certain at present – the leopard (in its all-black, i.e. melanistic, colour form, popularly termed the black panther) and the puma. But there could be two or three other species.

Q3: Where do you feel that these creatures have come from, how long have they been reported on Exmoor, and how are they able to survive here?

A3: Mysterious big cats have been reported on Exmoor for many years, long before the Drewstone incident occurred. I think they have come from very old captive situations, including menageries, perhaps even from Roman times, as well as from the various acclimatisation societies in Britain and Europe in more recent years. We then have an added modern situation, whereby many people were keeping exotic pet animals from the 1950s and 60s to the present day.

I believe the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 also played a part, in that when regulations governing the keeping of such animals were toughened, so releases occurred. I see no problems in terms of the animals surviving. There is at present ample food in the wild. There are also thousands of acres of cover, including huge tracts of forest, and a climate that is quite mild for most of the time, certainly here in the Westcountry.

Q4: What has been your closest encounter to date with a mystery big cat?

A4: I’ve had many close encounters, from 30 metres to a few hundred metres. Just recently,two of us watched a black leopard along a green lane. This was here on the Exmoor fringes, because there is a seasonal movement of these cats in the Westcountry, off the higher moors and high ground to lower-lying farmland during the winter. This of course makes sense, the weather being far worse up on the higher moors than in the low-lying farmland. In my most recent sighting, the animal became quickly aware of our presence, and disappeared into a copse to one side of the track we were all on.

Other encounters included the sighting of a puma in broad daylight, charging down across Exmoor‘s Challacombe Common, whilst I was leading a natural history field trip of around eight or nine people. The cat was running towards us, with its tail up, and veered away to disappear into a combe to the east of where we stood. Needless to say, I suggested that we ignore the animal and carry on with our field trip, and that is exactly what we did.

We now have no difficulty in locating and observing a big cat if we wish to, given two or three days in which to do so. The thing is to sit up in areas where you know that they are likely to be, or where they have territory, because they come back around to former sites, as a rule, over a fortnight or three weeks to a month period of time. So you should be able to work out, roughly, where a big cat might be within a few days. And of course, once you get a sighting, you’re away.

I’ve grown very fond of them, and hope to continue my studies of their natural history this summer, and to film them in the wild – more to prove that they are not as bad as some suggest, and are merely surviving in the rather alien world they have been placed in by irresponsible owners. I have no wish to film them in locations which, by showing a film publicly or via the media, might give away their whereabouts.

Q5: In your estimation, how many individual mystery cats might there be presently living in the Westcountry?

A5: It would be futile to try to estimate how many individuals there may be in the British countryside, but I’d estimate between 12 and 20 such cats in the Westcountry, bearing in mind that even with a breeding situation, it is unlikely that many cubs reach maturity, and thus numbers will remain stable but are not likely to increase dramatically – a situation rather like that of the otter, one might say.

Q6: In your opinion, what would be the ideal governmental response to the long-running controversy as to whether mystery big cats really do exist in Britain?

A6: It is difficult to suggest what the government’s response to the presence of mystery big cats and other carnivores should be. I do not think they should spend public money on removing them, unless they follow through with even tighter controls, including a ban on the keeping of such animals by members of the public. It seems quite wrong to me to trap, or more likely kill, the cats, yet allow the people who lost or released them to get away with it. Prevention is better than cure. I feel it is very unfair on the animals if this situation is permitted to continue, even should the present cats in the wild be captured. Without a ban, quite obviously the situation will simply continue.

Trevor Beer has also witnessed in the Westcountry some specimens of what he considers to be another non-native species of carnivore – a giant relative of weasels called the wolverine Gulo gulo, officially confined to the northernmost reaches of Europe and North America.

He and a colleague were conducting a wildlife survey near South Molton, Exmoor, in early January 1994 when they spied two unusual animals running along a disused railway line. No more than 40 yards away, each of the creatures was 3-4 ft long with a very thickset body, bear-like in general form except for its long bushy tail. Its fur was also very dense, and dark brown in colour, bearing a paler horizontal stripe along each flank. This description does not even vaguely recall any animal species native to Britain, but it perfectly matches the morphology of the wolverine.

Other Westcountry wolverine reports emanated from St Audries, Somerset, in February 1994; and during the spring or early summer of that same year, a dead wolverine was apparently sighted beside a road at Wembworthy by Joanne Crowther, a photographer visiting Devon from London, who did not realise the significance of her observation until she later described the carcase to some naturalists. The Westcountry reports followed similar accounts recorded from Dyfed in Wales, and dating back at least as far as February 1992.

But where could wolverines, which are seldom kept even in zoos in Britain, have come from? At least as far as the Westcountry specimens are concerned, Trevor can offer a very thought-provoking explanation: “My enquiries have led to the likelihood that these wolverines may be escapes from fur farms in England, and wolverines of course are more likely to take sheep than cats are”.

[During our countless communications by phone and letter down through many years, Trevor also mentioned to me a number of other mysterious creatures that have been reported on Exmoor and elsewhere in the Westcountry at one time or another; of particular interest to me were sightings of alleged phantom Black dogs, strange extra-large foxes or fox-like canids with grey fur referred to locally as hill foxes, and even a supposed (but never captured) escapee binturong – an exotic Asian civet often termed a bear-cat on account of its bizarre combination of superficially ursine and feline morphological features.]

ARE MYSTERY BIG CATS DANGEROUS TO HUMANS?

Throughout his many years of personal researches into the Westcountry’s mystery big cats, Trevor Beer has always maintained that he doubts these animals pose a serious threat to humans – unless they are harassed or persecuted. He considers that the most sensible course of action to pursue in relation to such creatures is simply to leave them well alone, and not even to follow up on sightings. Indeed, as is so often true in human interactions with other animals, it is conceivable that the biggest threat is posed not by the cats but by people: “I must say it does concern me that some idiot, somewhere, will attempt to shoot one, and perhaps wound it, in which case the wounded animal may well then turn nasty”.

As Trevor points out, it is not yet widely known but the police do have wildlife liaison officers now throughout the U.K. Hence he advises anyone who encounters a mystery big cat to report sightings to the police – “…or simply let the animal be. Never attempt to corner or trap it in any way is the best policy to adopt if you see one of these cats”. Sensible words – so let us hope that they are heeded by everyone.

I’ve viewed quite a number of fantasy-themed movies lately, some new, some vintage, some exceedingly obscure, but most of them offering various degrees of cryptozoological/zoomythological content and relevance. So be sure to click the link below to read my mini-reviews of these films, first published on my Facebook wall but now preserved together in my Eclectarium:The Eclectarium of Doctor Shuker: DREAMCHILD AND VAMPIRES AND HOBBITS, OH MY!

For zoologists, the year 1986 opened in a decidedly dramatic manner – with the apparent procurement on 1 January of a legendary creature whose existence had been denied by science for centuries. That evening, Mexican ranger Andres Rodriguez Murillo surprised a very large cat close to his home in the valley behind Parrot Mountain, in Mexico’s Sinaloa State. Fearing that it was a jaguar about to attack him, he shot it, but when he examined its body he found that it was neither a jaguar Panthera oncanor a puma Puma concolor – the only other large felid ‘officially’ existing in Mexico.

It did resemble a puma superficially, but its limbs were longer and its body was more slender, giving it a cheetah-like outline; in addition, its ears were unusually big, and the inner surfaces of its forelimbs bore dark markings not possessed by pumas. As Rodriguez had little knowledge of wildlife, he contacted an expert hunter by the name of Manuel Vega to come over and identify it for him. When Vega arrived, he felt sure that he recognised the cat – identifying it as an onza, the fabled thirdlarge cat of Mexico.

The puma (top) and the jaguar (bottom) – Mexico’s two official large cats (public domain)

The onza’s existence within the rugged mountainlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental is supported by more than 300 years’ worth of local eyewitness accounts (even including the testimony of visiting missionaries and Jesuit priests) from Sinaloa and also Sonora. Yet these had always been dismissed by zoologists as reports of poorly-seen or misidentified pumas.

Conversely, back in the 18th Century accounts of this controversial creature appeared in the works of several of Mexico’s learned Jesuit scholar-priests. They recorded that the onza is greatly feared by ranchers and peasants, and is said to be an unusually aggressive animal, far more dangerous than either the burly jaguar or the diffident puma, but far more elusive too.

However, it may be that the onza’s history can be traced back even further than this. According to Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, in 1519 the famous zoo owned by the Aztec king Montezuma contained two types of ‘lion’ (puma). One was the normal puma, but the other was a much more mystifying cat that supposedly resembled a wolf. As wolves have noticeably longer legs than pumas, was this unidentified animal the onza? Further details concerning the onza’s early history are given in my book Mystery Cats of the World.

Some 20th-century accounts of alleged onzas had actually been supported for a short time by complete specimens, though in every case these were somehow lost or destroyed. In spring 1926, for example, hunter-cowboy C.B. Ruggles trapped and killed a supposed onza southeast of Yaqui River in Mexico’s Sonora State. After taking some photos of its carcase, and noting that it had very skinny hindquarters, with dark spots on the inner side of its limbs, Ruggles discarded it. A few years later, American naturalist J. Frank Dobie reported shooting an onza caught in traps set on Mexico’s Barrancas de la Viboras; regrettably, its skin was subsequently devoured by bugs.

In 1938, while in the company of renowned hunters Dale and Clell Lee from Arizona, Indiana banker Joseph Shirk shot an onza on Sinaloa’s La Silla Mountain; photos show that, as with all of the others, it resembled an extremely gracile, long-limbed puma with big ears and unusual limb markings. Although much of its carcase was discarded, its skull was retained – only to vanish without trace when sent to a museum whose name, frustratingly, does not appear to have been placed on record. The dead body of a large unidentified felid that may well have been an onza was taken to Texas University in the late 1950s, but this cannot be traced either.

J. Richard Greenwell, at that time the secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC), who had a particular interest in the onza, succeeded in locating two onza skulls – one from a specimen shot in 1938 on La Silla Mountain by R.R.M. Carpenter while accompanied by Dale and Clell Lee (thus providing a remarkable parallel to the history of the Shirk specimen), the other from an onza shot by Jesus Vega (father of Manuel Vega) in much the same area sometime during the mid-1970s (this skull is now owned by rancher Ricardo Urquijo).

Additionally, another onza investigator, Arizona hunter Robert E. Marshall, was successful in obtaining the incomplete skull (its lower jaw was missing) of an onza shot during the 1950s at Los Frailes, Sinaloa. Marshall was also the author of The Onza – published in 1961, it was the first book devoted to this cryptid; a second, Onza! The Hunt For a Legendary Cat, written by Neil B. Carmony, was published in 1995. Both make fascinating reading, and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in cryptozoology.

Around the time of the shooting of the Rodriguez specimen in January 1986, an onza was allegedly captured alive, and held for several days in captivity at a ranch in northern Sonora, where it was supposedly photographed too. Tragically, however, when no-one showed any interest in it, its owner shot it and threw its body away. As for the photographs, these have yet to make a published appearance. And in early 1987, yet another onza was reportedly shot in Sinaloa, this time by a wealthy Mazatlan businessman; but, true to form, its remains were not preserved.

In short, with the exception of three skulls, physical remains of onzas have displayed a disconcerting tendency to disappear beyond the reach of scientists. The Rodriguez specimen, however, changed all of that – for instead of destroying its remains, the ranchers contacted Richard Greenwell. Following a complex series of interchanges, the precious specimen was transported to the Regional Diagnostic Laboratory of Animal Pathology, belonging to Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture and sited in Mazatlan, Sinaloa.

There it was painstakingly studied and dissected by a biological team headed by American puma researcher Dr Troy Best, who had been working alongside Greenwell during his earlier onza investigations. After the dissection, extensive samples of skeletal material, tissues, and blood were taken for examination and analysis in various U.S. research institutions, in a bid to uncover the onza’s taxonomic status. Several different taxonomic identities have been offered over the years, but the principal four are as follows.

The most exciting possibility is that it could be a currently undescribed species – one that quite conceivably descended from the typical puma, but later diverged from it to fill the ecological niche left vacant by the extinction approximately 11,000 years ago of Miracinonyx trumani – an extraordinary felid now known to have been a true American cheetah (it was first classed as a cheetah-like puma). Indeed, German felid specialist Dr Helmut Hemmer initially mooted that the onza may actually be a surviving representative of Truman’s cheetah, but after studying casts of two onza skulls and comparing them with fossil material from M. trumani, he changed his mind. However, regardless of whether it is even related to (let alone synonymous with) Truman’s cheetah, if the onza is indeed a valid species in its own right it should be distinguishable from the puma via the biochemical and genetic analyses conducted by those researchers studying the Rodriguez specimen (see below).

Another intriguing, frequently-raised possibility is that the onza is a naturally-occurring hybrid of puma and jaguar (i.e. either a pumajag or a jaguma). No evidence for this identity was obtained, however, from examination of the Rodriguez specimen. In any case, hybrids of this type that have been bred in captivity bear no resemblance to onzas, appearing visibly intermediate between puma and jaguar instead.

Two rather more conservative but still-interesting identities remain. The onza may simply be a mutant, non-taxonomically distinct form of the puma, the result of a genetic aberration that has yielded an uncommonly slim, leggy variety. If so, could it even be that an atavistic phenotype-influencing gene surviving from the period of shared ancestry by pumas and cheetahs but suppressed in normal pumas is somehow expressing itself in onza specimens, i.e. is responsible for ‘onzaism’ in pumas? If we take the Rodriguez specimen as a bona fide onza, the onza’s gracility is, indisputably, a natural facet of its appearance (rather than starvation-induced emaciation), because this specimen was found to possess adequate amounts of body fat. Genetically-induced onzaism may be confined to Mexico due to genetic drift; then again, as I noted in my 1989 mystery cats book, onza-like cats have also been reported from South America, so if the onza is indeed a freak non-taxonomic variety of puma, perhaps the mutant onza-inducing gene (should it exist) is more widely distributed among the global puma population after all. If not a genetic freak, the onza could be a separate subspecies of puma, kept apart from the Mexican puma Puma concolor azteca by behavioural differences and dissimilar habitat preferences. If the last-mentioned identity were the correct one, however, then once again (as with the possibility that it is a separate species) we would expect the onza to be distinguishable biochemically and genetically from other pumas. But is it?

Early biochemical tests had failed to uncover any characteristics differentiating the Rodriguez specimen from pumas, which would seem to suggest that onza and puma are very closely related. Yet this conclusion stems from a fundamental assumption that, although widely accepted in the zoological (and especially the cryptozoological) community, has never actually been confirmed. Namely, that the onza specimen whose tissues provided these biochemical results, i.e. the Rodriguez specimen, really wasan onza!

However, is it conceivable that Manuel Vega had been mistaken, and that this animal had merely been a malformed or infirm puma that only outwardly resembled a genuine onza? After reflecting upon this disturbing possibility for some time, in January 1998 I heretically aired it within an onza article of mine published in the British monthly magazine All About Cats – and it seems that my suspicions may indeed have been justified.

Only a few months after my article had appeared in print, the much-delayed volume of the ISC’s scientific journal Cryptozoologycovering the years 1993-1996 was finally published, and contained a report by a research team featuring Prof. Stephen O’Brien, an expert in feline molecular genetics. The team’s report revealed that after conducting comparative protein and mitochondrial DNA analyses using tissue samples taken from the Rodriguez onza and from specimens of known North American cat species, the results obtained for the Rodriguez onza were found to be indistinguishable from those of North American pumas. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that all onzas are pumas, but how savagely ironic it would be for the most celebrated supposed onza specimen not to have been an onza after all.

On 15 April 1995, an alleged male onza was shot behind Parrot Mountain, this time by rancher Raul Jiminez Dominguez. Later that same day, after having been frozen, the onza’s corpse was examined by two biologists from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, who took tissue samples away with them for electrophoretic analysis. The remainder of its carcase was preserved and dissected at Mazatlan for future study. Frustratingly, no further information has been made public concerning this specimen, but let us continue to hope that it will eventually provide a precise, unequivocal answer to the longstanding question of the onza’s taxonomic identity.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s feline enigma seems destined to remain a cryptozoological controversy – a far cry indeed from its popular yet sadly premature image as an erstwhile mystery cat whose reality is no longer in doubt.

Finally: please be aware that certain early 20th-Century animal encyclopaedias contain photographs of jaguarundis Puma yagouaroundi labelled as onzas (confusingly, this species is indeed sometimes termed an onza in certain Mexican states, including Jalisco). Nevertheless, anything less like the very large, long-limbed onza of cryptozoology than the much smaller, short-limbed jaguarundi of mainstream zoology would be difficult to imagine.

Having said that: in 2016, Mexican Facebook friend and artist Hodari Nundu revealed that he once saw in Jalisco a dead specimen of what he refers to as a ‘giant’ jaguarundi. And he subsequently learnt of a possible second location for such specimens, but he has refrained from publicly identifying this location in order to keep these cats safe if any do indeed exist there, noting only that it is a very long distance from Jalisco. This indicates that if other extra-large jaguarundis do occur in Mexico, they may be relatively widespread. Moreover, if they are of this species’ dark-grey/black colour phase, such cats may even explain reports here of mystery ‘black panthers’.

For zoologists, the year 1986 opened in a decidedly dramatic manner – with the apparent procurement on 1 January of a legendary creature whose existence had been denied by science for centuries. That evening, Mexican ranger Andres Rodriguez Murillo surprised a very large cat close to his home in the valley behind Parrot Mountain, in Mexico’s Sinaloa State. Fearing that it was a jaguar about to attack him, he shot it, but when he examined its body he found that it was neither a jaguar Panthera oncanor a puma Puma concolor – the only other large felid ‘officially’ existing in Mexico.

It did resemble a puma superficially, but its limbs were longer and its body was more slender, giving it a cheetah-like outline; in addition, its ears were unusually big, and the inner surfaces of its forelimbs bore dark markings not possessed by pumas. As Rodriguez had little knowledge of wildlife, he contacted an expert hunter by the name of Manuel Vega to come over and identify it for him. When Vega arrived, he felt sure that he recognised the cat – identifying it as an onza, the fabled thirdlarge cat of Mexico.

The puma (top) and the jaguar (bottom) – Mexico’s two official large cats (public domain)

The onza’s existence within the rugged mountainlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental is supported by more than 300 years’ worth of local eyewitness accounts (even including the testimony of visiting missionaries and Jesuit priests) from Sinaloa and also Sonora. Yet these had always been dismissed by zoologists as reports of poorly-seen or misidentified pumas.

Conversely, back in the 18th Century accounts of this controversial creature appeared in the works of several of Mexico’s learned Jesuit scholar-priests. They recorded that the onza is greatly feared by ranchers and peasants, and is said to be an unusually aggressive animal, far more dangerous than either the burly jaguar or the diffident puma, but far more elusive too.

However, it may be that the onza’s history can be traced back even further than this. According to Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, in 1519 the famous zoo owned by the Aztec king Montezuma contained two types of ‘lion’ (puma). One was the normal puma, but the other was a much more mystifying cat that supposedly resembled a wolf. As wolves have noticeably longer legs than pumas, was this unidentified animal the onza? Further details concerning the onza’s early history are given in my book Mystery Cats of the World.

Some 20th-century accounts of alleged onzas had actually been supported for a short time by complete specimens, though in every case these were somehow lost or destroyed. In spring 1926, for example, hunter-cowboy C.B. Ruggles trapped and killed a supposed onza southeast of Yaqui River in Mexico’s Sonora State. After taking some photos of its carcase, and noting that it had very skinny hindquarters, with dark spots on the inner side of its limbs, Ruggles discarded it. A few years later, American naturalist J. Frank Dobie reported shooting an onza caught in traps set on Mexico’s Barrancas de la Viboras; regrettably, its skin was subsequently devoured by bugs.

In 1938, while in the company of renowned hunters Dale and Clell Lee from Arizona, Indiana banker Joseph Shirk shot an onza on Sinaloa’s La Silla Mountain; photos show that, as with all of the others, it resembled an extremely gracile, long-limbed puma with big ears and unusual limb markings. Although much of its carcase was discarded, its skull was retained – only to vanish without trace when sent to a museum whose name, frustratingly, does not appear to have been placed on record. The dead body of a large unidentified felid that may well have been an onza was taken to Texas University in the late 1950s, but this cannot be traced either.

J. Richard Greenwell, at that time the secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC), who had a particular interest in the onza, succeeded in locating two onza skulls – one from a specimen shot in 1938 on La Silla Mountain by R.R.M. Carpenter while accompanied by Dale and Clell Lee (thus providing a remarkable parallel to the history of the Shirk specimen), the other from an onza shot by Jesus Vega (father of Manuel Vega) in much the same area sometime during the mid-1970s (this skull is now owned by rancher Ricardo Urquijo).

Additionally, another onza investigator, Arizona hunter Robert E. Marshall, was successful in obtaining the incomplete skull (its lower jaw was missing) of an onza shot during the 1950s at Los Frailes, Sinaloa. Marshall was also the author of The Onza – published in 1961, it was the first book devoted to this cryptid; a second, Onza! The Hunt For a Legendary Cat, written by Neil B. Carmony, was published in 1995. Both make fascinating reading, and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in cryptozoology.

Around the time of the shooting of the Rodriguez specimen in January 1986, an onza was allegedly captured alive, and held for several days in captivity at a ranch in northern Sonora, where it was supposedly photographed too. Tragically, however, when no-one showed any interest in it, its owner shot it and threw its body away. As for the photographs, these have yet to make a published appearance. And in early 1987, yet another onza was reportedly shot in Sinaloa, this time by a wealthy Mazatlan businessman; but, true to form, its remains were not preserved.

In short, with the exception of three skulls, physical remains of onzas have displayed a disconcerting tendency to disappear beyond the reach of scientists. The Rodriguez specimen, however, changed all of that – for instead of destroying its remains, the ranchers contacted Richard Greenwell. Following a complex series of interchanges, the precious specimen was transported to the Regional Diagnostic Laboratory of Animal Pathology, belonging to Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture and sited in Mazatlan, Sinaloa.

There it was painstakingly studied and dissected by a biological team headed by American puma researcher Dr Troy Best, who had been working alongside Greenwell during his earlier onza investigations. After the dissection, extensive samples of skeletal material, tissues, and blood were taken for examination and analysis in various U.S. research institutions, in a bid to uncover the onza’s taxonomic status. Several different taxonomic identities have been offered over the years, but the principal four are as follows.

The most exciting possibility is that it could be a currently undescribed species – one that quite conceivably descended from the typical puma, but later diverged from it to fill the ecological niche left vacant by the extinction approximately 11,000 years ago of Miracinonyx trumani – an extraordinary felid now known to have been a true American cheetah (it was first classed as a cheetah-like puma). Indeed, German felid specialist Dr Helmut Hemmer initially mooted that the onza may actually be a surviving representative of Truman’s cheetah, but after studying casts of two onza skulls and comparing them with fossil material from M. trumani, he changed his mind. However, regardless of whether it is even related to (let alone synonymous with) Truman’s cheetah, if the onza is indeed a valid species in its own right it should be distinguishable from the puma via the biochemical and genetic analyses conducted by those researchers studying the Rodriguez specimen (see below).

Another intriguing, frequently-raised possibility is that the onza is a naturally-occurring hybrid of puma and jaguar (i.e. either a pumajag or a jaguma). No evidence for this identity was obtained, however, from examination of the Rodriguez specimen. In any case, hybrids of this type that have been bred in captivity bear no resemblance to onzas, appearing visibly intermediate between puma and jaguar instead.

Two rather more conservative but still-interesting identities remain. The onza may simply be a mutant, non-taxonomically distinct form of the puma, the result of a genetic aberration that has yielded an uncommonly slim, leggy variety. If so, could it even be that an atavistic phenotype-influencing gene surviving from the period of shared ancestry by pumas and cheetahs but suppressed in normal pumas is somehow expressing itself in onza specimens, i.e. is responsible for ‘onzaism’ in pumas? If we take the Rodriguez specimen as a bona fide onza, the onza’s gracility is, indisputably, a natural facet of its appearance (rather than starvation-induced emaciation), because this specimen was found to possess adequate amounts of body fat. Genetically-induced onzaism may be confined to Mexico due to genetic drift; then again, as I noted in my 1989 mystery cats book, onza-like cats have also been reported from South America, so if the onza is indeed a freak non-taxonomic variety of puma, perhaps the mutant onza-inducing gene (should it exist) is more widely distributed among the global puma population after all. If not a genetic freak, the onza could be a separate subspecies of puma, kept apart from the Mexican puma Puma concolor azteca by behavioural differences and dissimilar habitat preferences. If the last-mentioned identity were the correct one, however, then once again (as with the possibility that it is a separate species) we would expect the onza to be distinguishable biochemically and genetically from other pumas. But is it?

Early biochemical tests had failed to uncover any characteristics differentiating the Rodriguez specimen from pumas, which would seem to suggest that onza and puma are very closely related. Yet this conclusion stems from a fundamental assumption that, although widely accepted in the zoological (and especially the cryptozoological) community, has never actually been confirmed. Namely, that the onza specimen whose tissues provided these biochemical results, i.e. the Rodriguez specimen, really wasan onza!

However, is it conceivable that Manuel Vega had been mistaken, and that this animal had merely been a malformed or infirm puma that only outwardly resembled a genuine onza? After reflecting upon this disturbing possibility for some time, in January 1998 I heretically aired it within an onza article of mine published in the British monthly magazine All About Cats – and it seems that my suspicions may indeed have been justified.

Only a few months after my article had appeared in print, the much-delayed volume of the ISC’s scientific journal Cryptozoologycovering the years 1993-1996 was finally published, and contained a report by a research team featuring Prof. Stephen O’Brien, an expert in feline molecular genetics. The team’s report revealed that after conducting comparative protein and mitochondrial DNA analyses using tissue samples taken from the Rodriguez onza and from specimens of known North American cat species, the results obtained for the Rodriguez onza were found to be indistinguishable from those of North American pumas. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that all onzas are pumas, but how savagely ironic it would be for the most celebrated supposed onza specimen not to have been an onza after all.

On 15 April 1995, an alleged male onza was shot behind Parrot Mountain, this time by rancher Raul Jiminez Dominguez. Later that same day, after having been frozen, the onza’s corpse was examined by two biologists from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, who took tissue samples away with them for electrophoretic analysis. The remainder of its carcase was preserved and dissected at Mazatlan for future study. Frustratingly, no further information has been made public concerning this specimen, but let us continue to hope that it will eventually provide a precise, unequivocal answer to the longstanding question of the onza’s taxonomic identity.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s feline enigma seems destined to remain a cryptozoological controversy – a far cry indeed from its popular yet sadly premature image as an erstwhile mystery cat whose reality is no longer in doubt.

Finally: please be aware that certain early 20th-Century animal encyclopaedias contain photographs of jaguarundis Puma yagouaroundi labelled as onzas (confusingly, this species is indeed sometimes termed an onza in certain Mexican states, including Jalisco). Nevertheless, anything less like the very large, long-limbed onza of cryptozoology than the much smaller, short-limbed jaguarundi of mainstream zoology would be difficult to imagine.

Having said that: in 2016, Mexican Facebook friend and artist Hodari Nundu revealed that he once saw in Jalisco a dead specimen of what he refers to as a ‘giant’ jaguarundi. And he subsequently learnt of a possible second location for such specimens, but he has refrained from publicly identifying this location in order to keep these cats safe if any do indeed exist there, noting only that it is a very long distance from Jalisco. This indicates that if other extra-large jaguarundis do occur in Mexico, they may be relatively widespread. Moreover, if they are of this species’ dark-grey/black colour phase, such cats may even explain reports here of mystery ‘black panthers’.

The largest species of gecko known to exist today in New Zealand is Duvaucel’s gecko Hoplodactylus duvaucelii, which attains a total length (snout-tip to tail-tip) of up to 12 in.

Just over a century ago, however, a much more sizeable species may have still survived here – if the evidence presented by a unique and truly extraordinary taxiderm specimen is anything to go by – and may even still do so today. I documented this fascinating case within my book The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals(2012) as follows:

The history of this mysterious taxiderm mega-lizard began sometime between 1833 and 1869, because that was the period during which France‘s MarseillesNaturalHistoryMuseum had received a specimen of a very unusual lizard from an unrecorded locality. As a mounted taxiderm exhibit, it was subsequently put on open display at the museum – where, for many years, it remained in full view of countless numbers of visitors, not to mention generations of museum scientists and many others who passed through from elsewhere. Yet, unbelievably, never once in all that time did anyone realise, or even suspect, that it belonged to a dramatically new species – one that had never been recorded by science!

The decades rolled by, but still the ignored lizard’s true identity remained undisclosed and uninvestigated – until as recently as 1979, when this strange specimen attracted the curiosity of the museum’s herpetology curator, Alain Delcourt. Eager to learn more about it, Delcourt took some photographs, and along with the specimen’s measurements he sent them for identification to a number of reptile experts around the world.

They ultimately reached Canadian biologist Dr Anthony P. Russell, who in turn showed them to VillanovaUniversity herpetologist Dr Aaron M. Bauer. Russell and Bauer recognised that the specimen was clearly a gecko, but of grotesquely gigantic proportions, measuring fractionally over 2 ft in total length. (This is 54 per cent larger than the world’s next biggest species of modern-day gecko, the New Caledonian giant forest gecko Rhacodactylus leachianus.) It was a short-headed, bulky-bodied creature, with sturdy legs and a long pointed tail, and was handsomely marked along its back with dark reddish-brown, longitudinal stripes overlying its yellowish-brown background colouration. In overall appearance, it compared fairly closely with geckos of the genus Hoplodactylus – except, once again, for its huge size.

The existence of this enigmatic lizard finally became known to the world at large in 1984, when Bauer’s investigations of its possible origin led him to New Zealand. And in 1986 its species was formally described by Bauer and Russell, who named it Hoplodactylus delcourti – in recognition of Delcourt’s laudable action in rescuing this long-neglected form from more than a century’s worth of zoological obscurity.

Its identification as a Hoplodactylus species had provided an important indication to its likely origin, because this genus’s species are mostly limited to New Zealand, thus implying very strongly that this was also the home of the giant H. delcourti. Extra support for this conclusion came from Bauer’s investigations here, because he learnt that Maori legends spoke of a strange New Zealand creature called the kawekaweau or kaweau. No-one had previously succeeded in identifying this mysterious animal with any known species inhabiting New Zealand, but various reports from the 19th Century described alleged encounters with such creatures.

One of the most detailed of these accounts, documented in 1873 by W. Mair, reported the killing of a kawekaweauthree years earlier in NorthIsland‘s WaimanaValley by a Urewera Maori chief. He had informed Mair that it was a large forest-dwelling lizard about 2 ft long, as thick as a man’s wrist, and brown in colour with red longitudinal stripes. This description is a near-perfect match with that of Delcourt’s giant gecko.

Bauer and Russell thus believe that the kawekaweau and H. delcourti may indeed be one and the same. Sadly, however, there seems little hope that this can ever be conclusively tested, because it is almost certain that H. delcourti has been extinct for many years. How ironic, that a species as striking as this one should vanish into oblivion while a specimen was actually on public display for many years at a renowned natural history museum.

Or has it really vanished? Wellington‘s Dominionnewspaper reported on 11 September 1984 that Wellington resident Dave Smith allegedly saw one on the western portion of North Island in the 1960s! Also, following a New Zealand radio programme broadcast on 23 March 1990 in which this species’ remarkable history was recounted by James Mack, assistant curator of New Zealand’s National Museum, the museum was contacted by several people who claimed to have spied living specimens of H. delcourti in recent times. The eyewitness accounts included three independent, reliable sightings all made at the same locality near Gisborne, on NorthIsland‘s eastern coast.

These, and various other reports, were followed up by herpetologist Anthony Whittaker and government scientist Bruce Thomas, but without success. Nevertheless, Whittaker believes that this species might still survive in the remote East Cape Forests. Perhaps, after all, there will come a time when Delcourt’s giant gecko will be known from more than just a single, long-forgotten taxiderm exhibit.

And that is where I concluded my coverage of this enigmatic species and specimen within my book on new and rediscovered animals; but during the years since then, I have uncovered some very intriguing additional, relevant information, so here it is.

Tuatara (public domain)

The kawekaweau is not the only extra-large mystery lizard on record from New Zealand. Most famous are the taniwha – New Zealand‘s very own dragons. Looking somewhat like gigantic gecko lizards, or even colossal tuataras Sphenodon punctatus (those primitive superficially lizard-like reptiles endemic to New Zealand but belonging to an otherwise exclusively prehistoric reptilian lineage known as the rhynchocephalians), and bearing a row of long sharp spines along the centre of their back, taniwha are still seriously believed in even today by the Maori people, and are said to have formidable supernatural powers.

In 2002, a major highway in New Zealand had to be rerouted because of Maori claims that it would otherwise intrude upon the abode of a taniwha. Even more recently, in 2012, a similar objection arose in relation to the planned $2.6 billion construction of a tunnel in Auckland, with protestors claiming that this would disturb a taniwha that lived under the city.

Taniwha carving (public domain)

Auckland notwithstanding, these formidable creatures normally inhabited dark, secluded localities on land, as well as in large freshwater pools, and sometimes in the sea too, and were reputedly able to tunnel directly through the earth, often causing floods or landslides as a result. Each taniwha was allied to a specific Maori tribe that it protected as long as it received a fitting level of respect and veneration, but it would often attack and devour members of other tribes.

Also present in Maori traditions are the ngarara – giant lizard-like land dragons seemingly resembling monitor lizards (even though these are not known to be native to New Zealand). Various ngarara could assume the form of a beautiful young woman (as could some taniwha).

Yet another giant mystery lizard of New Zealand is the kumi. Although occurring chiefly in Maori folklore, a real-life example was reportedly encountered near Gisborne in 1898 by a Maori bushman. He claimed that it was around 4.5 ft long, and that it clambered up into a rata tree, leaving behind some footprints on the ground, which were apparently seen by other observers too.

Could it be that in distant ages, giant lizards really did exist here, a land famous for its absence of terrestrial carnivores prior to humankind’s introduction of rats, cats, and dogs? Certainly there was a vacant ecological niche for such an animal form, but without physical evidence of any erstwhile presence, such as preserved or skeletal remains, this intriguing line of speculation must remain exactly that – speculation.

All of which brings us back very appositely to Delcourt’s giant gecko, because, very remarkably, there is actually no – or next to no – tangible evidence to confirm that it ever did (let alone still does) exist in New Zealand. Indeed, this anomalous paucity of physical remains for H. delcourti here is such that certain researchers have aired the view that perhaps the zoological world has been wrong all along, that in reality the provenance of the enigmatic taxiderm specimen residing at Marseilles Natural History Museum that is the only known representative of this very notable species was not New Zealand at all, but somewhere else entirely.

The leading researcher proffering this thought-provoking scenario is Dr Trevor H. Worthy, who has written and co-authored several scientific papers and other works relating to the lizards of New Zealand, past and present. In The Lost World of the Moa: Prehistoric Life of New Zealand(2002), co-authored with Dr Richard Holdaway, he noted that the taxiderm specimen of H. delcourti has been provenanced to New Zealand only upon the basis that the genus to which it belongs, Hoplodactylus, is known only from New Zealand, pointing out that not a single fossilised bone confirmed as being from this species has ever been discovered in the huge collections of palaeontological material obtained from South and North Islands (and despite much of this material dating from the late Pleistocene-Holocene time period).

True, two fossil items have been uncovered that were tentatively referred to H. delcourti by Bauer and Russell when they formally described and named this species in 1986, but Worthy is by no means convinced that such referrals were justified.

One of these items, found among a collection of tuatara remains, was a lower jaw comparable in size to that of tuataras but possessing spaces for teeth to be attached in sockets (the pleurodont condition, as found in lizards but not in tuataras). This had been obtained from Earnscleugh Cave in central Otago, South Island, during the 1800s, and was mentioned in passing within a paper authored by Captain F.W. Hutton that appeared in vol. 7 of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute in 1874 (not 1875, as often erroneously claimed). Hutton speculated in a later, 1898 paper (see below) that it “may, provisionally, be supposed to belong to the extinct kumi, or ngarara, of the Maoris”. Based upon Hutton’s brief verbal description of its morphology and size (the former excluding the tuatara from consideration as noted above, yet the latter exceeding that of any lizard species known to exist in New Zealand today), Bauer and Russell deemed it possible that this potentially significant item was from a specimen of H. delcourti, but regrettably it has apparently since been lost, because according to Worthy it does not seem to be present in the collections of Otago or Canterbury Museums where the fossils procured from this cave are preserved. Consequently, it cannot be re-examined today.

Happily, however, the second item, also uncovered in Earnscleugh Cave and documented in vol. 31 of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute by Hutton in 1898 (not 1899, as often erroneously claimed), does still survive, and is housed in Canterbury Museum. It consists of a small (0.55-in-long) rib-like bone that Hutton referred to as “a supposed rib of the kumi, or ngarara”. Bauer and Russell interpreted it as the cloacal bone of a gecko (but without physically examining it); if so, this would make it large enough to be consistent with H. delcourti as the species from which it originated. Conversely, Worthy does not believe that other taxonomic identities for it can be eliminated from consideration, stating:

The bone is not referable to any class of vertebrates with certainty; it could be one of the several vestigial bones in a rat, duck, or tuatara, and considering that thousands of bones have been obtained from the site (Earnscleugh Cave) from these animals, but not a single other gecko bone, its referral to H. delcourti is most unlikely to be correct.

More recently, in the multi-contributor volume New Zealand Lizards (2016), edited by Dr David G. Chapple, Worthy contributed a chapter entitled ‘A Review of the Fossil Record of New Zealand Lizards’, in which he again examined and discussed the stark absence of verified H. delcourti material, summarising this perplexing situation very succinctly as follows:

…there are now many thousands of fossil bones sampling palaeofaunas of all regions of New Zealand, including sites accumulated by predation by owls, falcons and other raptors, by pitfall into caves and which accumulated in sand dunes, swamps or lakes. The remains of many herpetofaunal species have been recovered from these sites in virtually all areas of New Zealand. Bones of tuatara are abundant and widespread. Not one bone of a gecko similar in size to a tuatara, as would be those of H. delcourti, has been found. But bones of a gecko the size of H. duvaucelii, New Zealand‘s largest extant gecko species, and of giant skinks, some much larger than any extant species, arc widespread. Therefore, if H. delcourti did derive from New Zealand, it must have existed in very localised habitats that have not yet been explored by palaeontologists. More likely, it was not a New Zealand animal and originates from a small island in New Caledonia, where other members of the group exist.

Worthy failed to specify, however, that there are a number of small isles lying off the two much larger, principal islands constituting New Zealand that definitely fall into his category of “very localised habitats that have not yet been explored by palaeontologists”. Could it be, therefore, that the single recorded H. delcourti specimen originated from one of these smaller offshore NZ islands? To my mind, it certainly seems more parsimonious to assume that, as a Hoplodactylus species, Delcourt’s giant gecko should have a provenance somewhere within New Zealand than beyond it, i.e. on an island of New Caledonia, or elsewhere.

In addition, if this species were rare or very rare anyway, the chances that fossil remains of it will even exist, let alone be discovered, will necessarily be much less likely than for more common, widely-distributed species. Also of note here is that if Worthy’s assertion that H. delcourti was probably not native to New Zealand is correct, then its striking resemblance to the Maoris’ mythical kawekaweau is a truly extraordinary and very formidable coincidence.

At least 150 years have passed since the type – and still the only known – specimen of H. delcourtiwas collected somewhere in the wild, but the many mysteries that have enshrouded it ever since still seem as impenetrable today as they did back then. Where was it collected, and by whom, is it one and the same as the mythical kawekaweau, why have no additional specimens or remains (modern-day or fossilised) ever been procured, and could there still be living specimens awaiting discovery somewhere out there?

Perhaps one day we shall have answers to some or even all of these questions. Until then, however, we have only Marseilles’s long-ignored taxiderm exhibit to remind us of this most mystifying chapter in herpetological history – and just like all such exhibits, it is remaining resolutely reticent.

NB – Some gecko coverages state that the world’s largest modern-day gecko species was actually the now-extinct Rodrigues day gecko Phelsuma gigas, once native to the Mascarene island of Rodrigues and various tiny offshore islets but last collected in 1842. However, although its snout-tip-to-vent length could exceed that of the only known specimen of H. delcourti (14.6 in), its total length (i.e. from snout-tip to tail-tip) was less.

It was only ever going to be a matter of time before ShukerNature boldly went where it has never gone before, by confronting what may well be not only the most terrifying cryptid of all time but also the most controversial one – the cryptid that dare not speak its name, in fact, because that name is…Megalodon!

Yes indeed, one of the most contentious, divisive subjects in the entire field of cryptozoology must surely be the putative existence into modern times of the giant megalodon shark, judging at least from the many heated, turbo-charged exchanges that it has engendered down through the years. For what it’s worth, and more than two decades on from when I first investigated the case, I personally think that this monstrous sea creature’s present-day survival is an unlikely prospect, but it is certainly an inordinately interesting one to research, as I rediscovered when preparing its greatly-expanded, updated section within my newest book Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors(2016). So now, having adopted in that book the role of devil’s advocate (as required per the brief issued by the publishers of its original edition, In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors), this is what I wrote:

The following lines were penned by Victorian naturalist Philip H. Gosse, and appeared in his book The Romance of Natural History (1860):

Half concealed beneath the bony brow, the little green eye gleams with so peculiar an expression of hatred, such a concentration of fiendish malice, of quiet, calm, settled villany, that no other countenance that I have ever seen at all resembles. Though I have seen many a shark, I could never look at that eye without feeling my flesh creep, as it were, on my bones.

This graphic description vividly expresses the galeophobic feelings of many people when confronted with sharks, especially the most feared species of all – Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark. The world’s largest living species of carnivorous fish (excluding plankton-eaters), it is known to attain a total length of up to 21 ft, but unconfirmed sightings of far bigger specimens have occasionally been recorded, mostly in tropical or sub-tropical waters. Could such sharks really exist – and, if they do, could they prove to be something even more terrifying than oversized great whites?

The great white shark (public domain)

In his book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas (1964), Antipodean ichthyologist Dr David G. Stead documented an astonishing account that had been narrated to him back in 1918 by some fishermen at Port Stephens, New South Wales. They claimed that their heavily-weighted crayfish pots, each measuring 3.5 ft long and containing several crayfishes (each weighing several pounds), had been effortlessly towed away by a ghostly white shark of enormous size. Estimates given by the fishermen ranged from the length of the wharf on which they had been standing, which measured 115 ft, to, in the opinion of one of the men, “300 ft long at least”! Even though Stead discounted these gargantuan estimates as the product of fear, he was clearly impressed by their claim, stating in his book:

In company with the local Fisheries Inspector I questioned many of the men very closely, and they all agreed as to the gigantic stature of the beast…And bear in mind that these were men who were used to the sea and all sorts of weather, and all sorts of sharks as well…They affirmed that the water ‘boiled’ over a large space when the fish swam past. They were all familiar with whales, which they had often seen passing at sea, but this was a vast shark…these were prosaic and rather stolid men, not given to ‘fish stories’ nor even to talking at all about their catches. Further, they knew that the person they were talking to (myself) had heard all the fish stories years before!…The local Fisheries Inspector of the time, Mr Paton, agreed with me that it must have been something really gigantic to put these experienced men into such a state of fear and panic.

Surprise and shock at unexpectedly encountering an awesome Moby Dick of the shark world may well have helped to distort their assessment. Yet even if we accordingly allow a very generous margin of exaggeration, the result is still a creature of far greater size than one would expect for the great white shark. Perhaps the most telling aspect of this episode, however, is that the men were so shaken, after seeing whatever it was they saw, that they weighed anchors straight away, fled back to port, and refused to go out to sea again for several days. This is hardly the behaviour that one would expect from people who know that they will not earn any money if they do not go out to sea – unless their story is true, and they really were frightened by a monstrous shark.

Zane Grey (public domain)

An immense shark, sporting a square head, huge pectoral fins, a green-yellow body speckled with a few white spots (encrusted barnacles?), and measuring considerably more in total length than his 35-40-ft boat was spied in 1927 or 1928 by Zane Grey, while sailing off the French Polynesian island of Rangiroa (about 220 miles northeast of Tahiti) in the South Pacific’s Tuamotu Archipelago. Grey was a famous, prolific writer of Western novels, but he was also a passionate angler and the author of eight angling books, including Tales of Tahitian Waters (1931), containing his account of his shark sighting.

Yet despite his experience in handling fishes of record-breaking size, Grey was unable to identify this immense specimen. A square head is certainly not reminiscent of a great white shark, of any size, but rather a whale shark Rhincodon typus. This harmless planktivorous species constitutes the world’s largest fish of any type, with a maximum confirmed length of 41.5 ft (but likely to attain up to 50 ft), and it does have a very broad, massive head. Then again, read the next report…

In 1933, when about 100 miles northwest of Rangiroa aboard the S.S. Manganui, Grey’s son, Loren, also caught sight of a gigantic shark, once again yellowish in colour but flecked with white, which revealed a great brown tail, plus a massive head that seemed to be at least 10-12 ft across, and a total body length estimated by Grey Jnr to be not less than 40-50 ft. However, he was convinced that it was not a whale shark. So what was it?

According to traditional beliefs of the Polynesian fishermen who work along the coasts of New South Wales, these waters are frequented by a frightening type of sea creature that they respectfully refer to as the Lord of the Deep. They liken it to a gigantic white shark, measuring about 100 ft in length. Is this what the Greys spied, and could this be what carried away the pots of the lobster fishermen in 1918?

In his book Shark!(1961), Thomas Helm documented his own (undated) encounter with a giant mystery shark. He and some other people were on board his 60-ft trawler in the Caribbean Sea when they spied a huge shark that he claimed was “not an inch less than thirty feet”. He was able to estimate this accurately by comparing its length to that of his trawler; and he also noted that when it swam underneath, its pectoral fins were clearly visible on either side of the boat. He and the other eyewitnesses were unable to identify its species, but he stated that it “most closely resembled the [great] white shark”.

During the 1970s, a Mrs T. Brinks and her keen sailor husband Dave were sailing their 40-ft boat about 100 miles west of Monterey Bay, California, when they encountered what looked like a great white shark but of huge proportions. When it swam alongside their vessel, they could see that in total length it equalled that of the boat. After a few moments, it veered to the west, swimming underneath their boat before disappearing (they actually felt the boat rise as it swam beneath it). The Brinkses later recalled their encounter with one of Mrs Brinks’s work colleagues, Jon Ziegler, from Idaho, who presented the details in a letter published online by Strange Magazine in 2005.

More recently, in Season 3, Episode 7 (entitled ‘Mega Jaws’), first screened on 18 March 2009, the cryptozoological TV show MonsterQuest unsuccessfully sought a giant black carnivorous shark occasionally sighted in the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California), off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Fisherman witnesses claim that it is 20-60 ft long, resembles a huge great white shark except for its dark colouration and massive tail, and have dubbed it El Demonio Negro (‘the Black Demon’). Might it be a melanistic great white (a huge great white that was fairly dark dorsally and measured almost 20 ft long was hauled up out of the Sea of Cortez by commercial fishermen in April 2013, and parts of this sea are now known to serve as a great white shark nursery), or could it be something very different indeed?

Many ichthyologists are willing to consider the possibility that there are larger specimens of great white shark in existence than have so far been verified by science, but some cryptozoologists are far bolder. Their explanation for the Lord of the Deep is far more spectacular – a terrifying prehistoric resurrection, featuring a living leviathan from the ancient waters.

The great white shark once had an even bigger relative – the megalodon or megatooth shark C. megalodon (‘big tooth’), sometimes placed in its own genus, Carcharocles. Named after its huge teeth, which were triangular in shape, up to 7.25 in high, and edged with sharp serrations, the megalodon was once believed to measure as much as 98 ft long, but this early estimate of its size was later shown to be incorrect, and was refined to a much more sedate yet still unnerving 43 ft. However, after various extra-large megalodon teeth, some almost 6 in long, were unearthed a while ago at the aptly-dubbed Sharktooth Hill near Bakersfield, California, ichthyologists conceded that certain specimens might have attained a total length of up to 55 ft.

The megalodon is presently known almost entirely from its huge teeth and some individual vertebrae. However, one notable exception is an associated vertebral column of approximately 150 individual centra (vertebra bodies) that range in state from fragmentary to nearly complete. In the major monograph Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias (1996), edited by Drs A. Peter Klimley and David G. Ainley, shark experts Drs Michael D. Gottfried, Leonard J.V. Compagno, and S. Curtis Bowman suggested on the basis of the previously-mentioned vertebral column’s dimensions and other megalodon remains that in order to support its substantial dentition, the megalodon’s jaws would have been “somewhat more robust, larger, and thicker, and with correspondingly more massive muscles to operate them” than those of the great white shark. In overall appearance, they proposed that the megalodon “would likely have had a streamlined, fusiform shape similar to, but more robust than, the [great] white shark and other lamnids, with more bulging jaws and a broader, blunter, and relatively more massive head”.

If this reconstruction is accurate, might it explain the Greys’ comments about the massive or square-shaped head of their respective giant mystery sharks? Moreover, it is believed that the fins of the megalodon were proportional to its larger size, and hence were bigger than those of the great white. Could this therefore explain the huge pectoral fins sported by the giant mystery shark sighted by Zane Grey?

Once believed to be an exclusively near-surface, continental shelf dweller in tropical and subtropical seas, the megalodon is now thought to have been sufficiently adaptable to have inhabited a wide range of environments, from shallow coastal waters and swampy coastal lagoons to sandy littorals and offshore deepwater abodes, exhibiting a transient lifestyle, and of near-cosmopolitan geographical distribution. Adult specimens, however, were not common in shallow-water habitats (thus explaining the relative rarity of modern-day Lord of the Deep and other super-sized great white lookalike sightings?), and mostly lurked offshore, but may have moved between coastal and oceanic habitats during different stages of the life cycle.

The megalodon first appeared in the fossil record around 16 million years ago during the mid-Miocene, and was undoubtedly one of the most formidable marine predators of all time. So why, according to mainstream zoology, did it become extinct (if, indeed, it did!)? As yet, there is no definitive answer to this key question. However, the cooling of the oceans that occurred during the late Pliocene and Pleistocene in conjunction with the Ice Ages (an occurrence not conducive to the megalodon’s survival, as it favoured warmer, tropical waters), coupled with the resulting migration towards colder, high-latitude regions by the larger whales that constituted its preferred prey (megalodon tooth marks on the fossil bones of such cetaceans are well documented), is the scenario most favoured as the cause of this giant shark’s apparent extinction. Also, during the Ice Ages a substantial volume of seawater became locked inside continental ice sheets, thereby resulting in a significant worldwide fall in sea levels, which is something else that was not compatible with megalodon survival, restricting the number of nursery sites available for its juveniles’ safe maturation.

Yet in view of how adaptable the megalodon was in terms of the variety of marine environments that it could inhabit, might it have once again been sufficiently adaptable to withstand these changes? True, the fossil record does not contain ample evidence of its survival in regions where water temperatures had significantly declined during the Pliocene. Then again, as pointed out by Gottfried et al., this species may have existed in environments “…that have gone unrecognized due to preservational and/or collecting biases” – a significant but all-too-often ignored or neglected factor when making assumptions based upon the known fossil record.

Also, in view of the several exceedingly large whale species existing then, and still today (the whale hunting industry’s depredations notwithstanding), the megalodon would not be short of suitable prey (big cetaceans, along with pinnipeds and fish too, are believed to have constituted its preferred diet). And what if, like the huge carnivorous sperm whale, it also sought out sizeable deepwater species such as giant squids, common in tropical as well as temperate seas, but for which, as is often true from deepwater habitats, there would be little if any readily available confirmation from the fossil record?

Even if faced with competition from today’s largest carnivorous cetaceans, might there still be enough suitable prey out there in the vast oceans to sustain a viable megalodon population? After all, even large migratory whales like the blue whale and grey whale still spend part of their year in sub-tropical waters; and during those periods that these cetaceans spend in more polar zones, megalodons could subsist instead upon big fishes like the basking shark, whale shark, and abundant smaller species existing in sizeable shoals, plus giant squids.

Irrespective of the precise reason(s) why it died out, the findings of a 2014 study by American researchers Drs Catalina Pimiento and Christopher F. Clements (published by the journal PLoS ONE) suggest that the megalodon most likely did so approximately 2.6 million years ago, during the late Pliocene (a few have opined that it may have persisted into the early Pleistocene). However, these dates fail to take into account a dramatic, highly controversial revelation that occurred at the close of the 1950s. Back in 1875, the British oceanographic survey vessel H.M.S.Challenger had hauled up two megalodon teeth from the manganese dioxide-rich red clay deposit at a depth of 14,000 ft on the sea bed south of Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean. When, in 1959, these teeth were dated by Russian scientist Dr Wladimir Tschernezky, the scientific world received a considerable shock. Knowing the rate of formation of the manganese dioxide layer covering them, he had measured the thickness of the layer – and from the results that he had obtained, he announced in a paper published on 24 October 1959 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that one of the teeth was only 24,000 years old, and the other was a mere 11,000 years old.

In short, ifTschernezky’s results were accurate, the megalodon shark was still alive at the end of the Pleistocene epoch 11,700 years ago. And if this is true, it would again lend credibility to speculation among some cryptozoologists that this incredible species may still be alive today. It is nothing if not intriguing, incidentally, that these two enigmatic teeth were obtained in much the same (Tahitian) locality as that of the giant sharks respectively encountered by the Greys. Just a coincidence?

HMS Challenger, 1858 engraving (public domain)

Having said that, there remains much contention among current ichthyologists and palaeontologists regarding Tschernezky’s results. The main argument against them is that the teeth may have originally been reworked from older strata, as has been discussed earlier in this present book with respect to various alleged post-Mesozoic dinosaur and plesiosaur fossils. Also, there can be considerable variation in results obtained for the dating of manganese dioxide deposits, depending upon whether maximum or minimum deposition rates for them are being used, and such deposits also vary in relation to a number of fluctuating external factors such as the concentration in seawater of iron ions and photosynthesising plankton. Whether such variations can be so extreme as to yield a date as recent as only 11,000 years ago as opposed to one of at least 2.6 million years ago, conversely, has yet to be confirmed.

Also worthy of note here is the following statement from the earlier-cited paper by Pimiento and Clements:

In a very small proportion of simulations (1.5%), the inferred date of extinction fell after 0.1 Ma. In six simulations (0.06%) the inferred date of extinction fell after the present day (and thus the species could not be considered as extinct). However, because in the vast majority of the 10,000 simulations (>99.9%) the extinction time was inferred to have occurred before the present day, we reject the null hypothesis (that the species is extant) and the popular claims of present day survival of C. megalodon.

In short, although too small in number to be considered statistically significant, from the vast array of fossil samples utilised in their simulations a few modern-day inferred extinction dates did occur, as well as some with an inferred extinction date of under 100,000 years. How can these be explained and which specific samples were responsible, I wonder?

All in all, if they still exist it would be very interesting to see those two teeth that were dated so contentiously by Tschernezky back in the late 1950s subjected now to modern-day dating techniques. The most common method for Quaternary (Pleistocene and Holocene) remains – which these teeth would be if Tschernezky’s age estimates for them of 24,000 and 11,000 years respectively are correct – is radiocarbon (carbon-14) dating, but it generally cannot date specimens older than around 60,000 years. However, a more recent and potentially much more useful technique, which has already been proved to be effective with fossil teeth, is electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR).

As noted in a 14 February 2014 Spectroscopy Europe online paper authored by Dr Mathieu Duval from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain, optimum time range application for EPR dating of tooth enamel lies between c.50,000 years and c.800,000 years. Moreover, in some specific conditions, the real time-range limits for EPR dating may be potentially pushed from present-day to around 2–3 million years. This means that EPR dating not only could demonstrate unequivocally whether Tschernezky’s unexpectedly recent age estimates for these two very contentious megalodon teeth were correct, but also might still be able to provide an age for them even if they actually do date back to the time of the megalodon’s official demise, i.e. approximately 2.6 million years ago – something that radiocarbon dating could not achieve.

A white fossil megalodon tooth (public domain)

One final comment regarding giant, ostensibly anachronistic shark teeth: in his authoritative work The Fishes of Australia Part 1: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-Fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand (1940), Gilbert P. Whitley, then Curator of Fishes at the Natural History Museum in Sydney, Australia, stated:

Fresh-looking [megalodon] teeth measuring 4 by 3 1/4 inches have been dredged from the sea floor, which indicates that if not actually still living, this gigantic species must have become extinct within a recent period.

Unfortunately, he didn’t provide further details concerning these bold claims. Fossil megalodon teeth are generally black or grey, less commonly brown and even gold, but white specimens are also known – and although they too are fossilised, these latter ones can look deceptively recent in appearance, so Whitley may have been mistaken. As for the teeth noted by him, sadly I have no knowledge of where they currently reside.

In summary: Dr Stead considered that the shark responsible for towing away the fishermens’ lobster pots could have been a living megalodon, but just how likely is this terrifying prospect? I am well aware that by virtue of its very nature, the megalodon must surely appear to be one of this book’s least likely creatures to survive in the present day. Having said that: if, as noted here, this monstrous carnivorous shark dined upon large whales, pinnipeds, fishes, and (especially) giant squids, moving up and down through the sea depths in search of its varied prey, its huge food requirements could surely be met. And if, as predicted from palaeontological studies, it only occasionally entered the oceans’ surface waters as an adult, this might explain how in spite of its great size it has succeeded in eluding science, and why even fishermen in its general area of distribution only rarely catch sight of it.

Certainly, as someone who in 2008 flew from Santiago in Chile to Easter Island and, in so doing, spent no less than 4 hours travelling continuously across a seemingly limitless blue expanse of water with never so much as the tiniest speck of land in sight, yet knowing full well that this was in reality only a minute portion of the Pacific’s full mid-oceanic extent, I feel qualified to offer the opinion that in such an unimaginably vast yet (for the greater part) only sparsely visited expanse of water relatively speaking, even creatures as huge as megalodons could surely exist just beneath the surface without ever being seen by humans for much if not all of their life. Here they could readily avoid the occasional cruiser or other sizeable sea vessel crossing the immense mid-ocean stretches of water upon which the various Pacific island groups are scattered like mere confetti, and only occasionally approach the shores of such islands where they may conceivably attract brief attention before travelling back out to the open seas once more.

We know that in Pliocene times megalodons occurred in coastal waters (albeit only rarely as adults), because the fossil record tells us so. But what if megalodons also lived in mid-oceanic stretches where any dead specimens either were consumed by other marine carnivores or became fossilised in locations where such remains can never be uncovered, such as the sea bottom – except, possibly, for a few anachronistic teeth dredged up by a research vessel?

And even if such a creature is spied once in a while when far out to sea, by some ocean-going tourists or bold fishermen venturing further out than usual from their coastal zone, what will they see? Just a triangular dorsal fin resembling a slightly larger-than-normal great white’s, cutting silently through the water? Who would think to report that as anything special?

However, one could also argue that if the megalodon has indeed survived into the modern day, why was it not reported by whalers during the whaling age? Great white sharks were frequently attracted to harpooned, massively-bleeding whales, sometimes causing problems for whalers trying to land these huge, dying sea mammals or their carcases. How much greater a problem, therefore, would megalodons have posed? Yet I am not aware of any whaling records describing encounters with sharks that might have been megalodons.

As for smaller, juvenile megalodons, surely these would be hooked or entangled in netting from time to time, just like similar-sized adult great whites are? Yet again, however, there do not appear to be records of this, unless any such juveniles that may have been caught looked similar enough to adult great whites for anglers not to have considered them worthy of being brought to zoological attention?

Also, if the megalodon still exists there would surely be big whales out there that have survived a megalodon attack yet carry the scars created by such a monster’s huge teeth, but again I am unaware of any records of this. Then again, any whale surviving a megalodon attack would need to be very big indeed, and such individuals probably remain far out of sight in the open oceans, and those not surviving such an attack would be devoured by the victorious megalodon, with any remains simply sinking to the ocean floor.

Yet another anomaly if the megalodon is indeed still alive today is why no modern-day megalodon teeth have ever been found, bearing in mind that sharks shed numerous teeth every year, and that assemblages of shark teeth from other species have been procured from the sea floor. Then again, perhaps some modern megalodon teeth have been obtained, but, in view of how sought-after their fossil equivalents are by collectors (and expensive too!), have simply not been publicly revealed.

Having said all of this, there is a notable modern-day precedent for large sharks remaining hidden from science. In November 1976, a major new species of very large shark was accidentally captured by a research vessel anchored off the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Attempting to swallow one of the ship’s parachute anchors, it had choked to death, despite its enormous mouth, which swiftly earned its species a very appropriate name – the megamouth shark Megachasma pelagios. Measuring up to 18 ft long, this very distinctive species has since been recorded from waters all around the world, and observations of living specimens fitted with tracking devices have revealed that it undergoes vertical migration – staying in the depths of the sea during the day, and rising to the surface only at night. This explains how such a large and widely-distributed shark species had successfully managed to evade scientific detection until as late a date as 1976.

In fact, a megamouth – or some other very large, formally undescribed species of deepwater shark – may actually have been seen and photographed by a scientific team a full 10 years earlier. On 15 August 1966, the San Mateo Times, a Californian newspaper, carried the following very intriguing report:

Undersea cameras of the Scripps Institute of Oceanogra­phy have photographed a colossal shark-like fish that is unfa­miliar and may prefer living in the darkest depths of the Pacific.

Scripps’ Dr. John D. Isaacs, speaking at a weekend confer­ence, estimated the fish at 15-20 feet in length and three to six feet thick at its widest.

The species could not be determined, he said, because of the unmanned camera’s limited field which only allowed pictur­ing the fish’s gills and pectoral fin.

“It is probably a shark, but a shark the likes of which we have never seen before,” he said. The fish was photographed at a depth of 6,OOO feet off San Clemente Island, which is about 75 miles south of Los Angeles.

Since the first megamouth was caught off Oahu in 1976, several have been washed ashore or documented in waters off California, lending further support to the possibility that the Scripps’s mystery shark was a specimen of this very big species – always assuming, of course, that it wasn’t a juvenile megalodon…?

Incidentally, crypto-sceptics have suggested that the megalodon could not exist as a deepwater species because it would require all manner of morphological specialisations, but in view of the fact that the only physical remains that we have of it are teeth and vertebrae, how can anyone say with certainty that it didn’t – or doesn’t – possess any such specialisations?

Bearing in mind, therefore, that a mere 40 years ago the megamouth was still unseen and undiscovered by science, the prospect for prehistoric persistence of the megalodon cannot be entirely denied out of hand – however much we may wish to banish from our minds the disturbing image of a rapacious, flesh-eating shark at least twice the size of the current record-holder for the great white, cruising anonymously beneath the surface of the Pacific in the 21st Century.

Last – and least – of all but requiring a mention here if only because of how much confusion it caused (and still causes) among viewers not well-versed in cryptozoology is the infamous ‘mockumentary’/’docufiction’ Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, which was first aired on the American TV network Discovery Channel in 2013, concerning the alleged modern-day survival of this giant shark species. The programme has an entry on Wikipedia that summarises its history very succinctly as follows:

The story, with only short disclaimers at the beginning and ending indicating that it is fictional, revolves around the loss of a pleasure boat and crew off the coast of South Africa and an ensuing investigation that points to an attack by a member of the species megalodon, a prehistoric shark thought to be long extinct. Its format is that of a documentary that includes accounts of “professionals” in various fields related to Megalodon. It follows a similar format to another docufictionaired by Discovery Channel, Mermaids: The Body Found.

The show, like Mermaids, came under equal criticism and scrutiny by both scientists and ordinary viewers due to the attempt to present fiction as a non-fiction documentary. Despite the disclaimers, some people actually believed they were watching a real documentary while others were offended that a docufictionshow would be aired on a channel that had been known for true science shows. It should also be noted [that], unlike Mermaids, the disclaimers were barely even present, in addition to the talk show that was strongly saying and asking if people believed what was presented in Megalodonshowed that the species was still alive. This misinformation likely caused the mass misconception that the shark species was still alive.

No it didn’t – speculation on this subject was rife long before the programme was produced. As for whether the modern-day existence of the megalodon actually is – or is not – a misconception, this has already been discussed soberly and at length in the present section of this book. In my opinion, however, any attempt to do so in an equally rational, objective manner elsewhere is always likely to be overshadowed nowadays by the Discovery mockumentary’s unhelpful contribution to the subject, which is a tragedy for those seeking to bestow gravitas and credibility upon serious cryptozoological debate.

It was only ever going to be a matter of time before ShukerNature boldly went where it has never gone before, by confronting what may well be not only the most terrifying cryptid of all time but also the most controversial one – the cryptid that dare not speak its name, in fact, because that name is…Megalodon!

Yes indeed, one of the most contentious, divisive subjects in the entire field of cryptozoology must surely be the putative existence into modern times of the giant megalodon shark, judging at least from the many heated, turbo-charged exchanges that it has engendered down through the years. For what it’s worth, and more than two decades on from when I first investigated the case, I personally think that this monstrous sea creature’s present-day survival is an unlikely prospect, but it is certainly an inordinately interesting one to research, as I rediscovered when preparing its greatly-expanded, updated section within my newest book Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors(2016). So now, having adopted in that book the role of devil’s advocate (as required per the brief issued by the publishers of its original edition, In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors), this is what I wrote:

The following lines were penned by Victorian naturalist Philip H. Gosse, and appeared in his book The Romance of Natural History (1860):

Half concealed beneath the bony brow, the little green eye gleams with so peculiar an expression of hatred, such a concentration of fiendish malice, of quiet, calm, settled villany, that no other countenance that I have ever seen at all resembles. Though I have seen many a shark, I could never look at that eye without feeling my flesh creep, as it were, on my bones.

This graphic description vividly expresses the galeophobic feelings of many people when confronted with sharks, especially the most feared species of all – Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark. The world’s largest living species of carnivorous fish (excluding plankton-eaters), it is known to attain a total length of up to 21 ft, but unconfirmed sightings of far bigger specimens have occasionally been recorded, mostly in tropical or sub-tropical waters. Could such sharks really exist – and, if they do, could they prove to be something even more terrifying than oversized great whites?

The great white shark (public domain)

In his book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas (1964), Antipodean ichthyologist Dr David G. Stead documented an astonishing account that had been narrated to him back in 1918 by some fishermen at Port Stephens, New South Wales. They claimed that their heavily-weighted crayfish pots, each measuring 3.5 ft long and containing several crayfishes (each weighing several pounds), had been effortlessly towed away by a ghostly white shark of enormous size. Estimates given by the fishermen ranged from the length of the wharf on which they had been standing, which measured 115 ft, to, in the opinion of one of the men, “300 ft long at least”! Even though Stead discounted these gargantuan estimates as the product of fear, he was clearly impressed by their claim, stating in his book:

In company with the local Fisheries Inspector I questioned many of the men very closely, and they all agreed as to the gigantic stature of the beast…And bear in mind that these were men who were used to the sea and all sorts of weather, and all sorts of sharks as well…They affirmed that the water ‘boiled’ over a large space when the fish swam past. They were all familiar with whales, which they had often seen passing at sea, but this was a vast shark…these were prosaic and rather stolid men, not given to ‘fish stories’ nor even to talking at all about their catches. Further, they knew that the person they were talking to (myself) had heard all the fish stories years before!…The local Fisheries Inspector of the time, Mr Paton, agreed with me that it must have been something really gigantic to put these experienced men into such a state of fear and panic.

Surprise and shock at unexpectedly encountering an awesome Moby Dick of the shark world may well have helped to distort their assessment. Yet even if we accordingly allow a very generous margin of exaggeration, the result is still a creature of far greater size than one would expect for the great white shark. Perhaps the most telling aspect of this episode, however, is that the men were so shaken, after seeing whatever it was they saw, that they weighed anchors straight away, fled back to port, and refused to go out to sea again for several days. This is hardly the behaviour that one would expect from people who know that they will not earn any money if they do not go out to sea – unless their story is true, and they really were frightened by a monstrous shark.

Zane Grey (public domain)

An immense shark, sporting a square head, huge pectoral fins, a green-yellow body speckled with a few white spots (encrusted barnacles?), and measuring considerably more in total length than his 35-40-ft boat was spied in 1927 or 1928 by Zane Grey, while sailing off the French Polynesian island of Rangiroa (about 220 miles northeast of Tahiti) in the South Pacific’s Tuamotu Archipelago. Grey was a famous, prolific writer of Western novels, but he was also a passionate angler and the author of eight angling books, including Tales of Tahitian Waters (1931), containing his account of his shark sighting.

Yet despite his experience in handling fishes of record-breaking size, Grey was unable to identify this immense specimen. A square head is certainly not reminiscent of a great white shark, of any size, but rather a whale shark Rhincodon typus. This harmless planktivorous species constitutes the world’s largest fish of any type, with a maximum confirmed length of 41.5 ft (but likely to attain up to 50 ft), and it does have a very broad, massive head. Then again, read the next report…

In 1933, when about 100 miles northwest of Rangiroa aboard the S.S. Manganui, Grey’s son, Loren, also caught sight of a gigantic shark, once again yellowish in colour but flecked with white, which revealed a great brown tail, plus a massive head that seemed to be at least 10-12 ft across, and a total body length estimated by Grey Jnr to be not less than 40-50 ft. However, he was convinced that it was not a whale shark. So what was it?

According to traditional beliefs of the Polynesian fishermen who work along the coasts of New South Wales, these waters are frequented by a frightening type of sea creature that they respectfully refer to as the Lord of the Deep. They liken it to a gigantic white shark, measuring about 100 ft in length. Is this what the Greys spied, and could this be what carried away the pots of the lobster fishermen in 1918?

In his book Shark!(1961), Thomas Helm documented his own (undated) encounter with a giant mystery shark. He and some other people were on board his 60-ft trawler in the Caribbean Sea when they spied a huge shark that he claimed was “not an inch less than thirty feet”. He was able to estimate this accurately by comparing its length to that of his trawler; and he also noted that when it swam underneath, its pectoral fins were clearly visible on either side of the boat. He and the other eyewitnesses were unable to identify its species, but he stated that it “most closely resembled the [great] white shark”.

During the 1970s, a Mrs T. Brinks and her keen sailor husband Dave were sailing their 40-ft boat about 100 miles west of Monterey Bay, California, when they encountered what looked like a great white shark but of huge proportions. When it swam alongside their vessel, they could see that in total length it equalled that of the boat. After a few moments, it veered to the west, swimming underneath their boat before disappearing (they actually felt the boat rise as it swam beneath it). The Brinkses later recalled their encounter with one of Mrs Brinks’s work colleagues, Jon Ziegler, from Idaho, who presented the details in a letter published online by Strange Magazine in 2005.

More recently, in Season 3, Episode 7 (entitled ‘Mega Jaws’), first screened on 18 March 2009, the cryptozoological TV show MonsterQuest unsuccessfully sought a giant black carnivorous shark occasionally sighted in the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California), off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Fisherman witnesses claim that it is 20-60 ft long, resembles a huge great white shark except for its dark colouration and massive tail, and have dubbed it El Demonio Negro (‘the Black Demon’). Might it be a melanistic great white (a huge great white that was fairly dark dorsally and measured almost 20 ft long was hauled up out of the Sea of Cortez by commercial fishermen in April 2013, and parts of this sea are now known to serve as a great white shark nursery), or could it be something very different indeed?

Many ichthyologists are willing to consider the possibility that there are larger specimens of great white shark in existence than have so far been verified by science, but some cryptozoologists are far bolder. Their explanation for the Lord of the Deep is far more spectacular – a terrifying prehistoric resurrection, featuring a living leviathan from the ancient waters.

The great white shark once had an even bigger relative – the megalodon or megatooth shark C. megalodon (‘big tooth’), sometimes placed in its own genus, Carcharocles. Named after its huge teeth, which were triangular in shape, up to 7.25 in high, and edged with sharp serrations, the megalodon was once believed to measure as much as 98 ft long, but this early estimate of its size was later shown to be incorrect, and was refined to a much more sedate yet still unnerving 43 ft. However, after various extra-large megalodon teeth, some almost 6 in long, were unearthed a while ago at the aptly-dubbed Sharktooth Hill near Bakersfield, California, ichthyologists conceded that certain specimens might have attained a total length of up to 55 ft.

The megalodon is presently known almost entirely from its huge teeth and some individual vertebrae. However, one notable exception is an associated vertebral column of approximately 150 individual centra (vertebra bodies) that range in state from fragmentary to nearly complete. In the major monograph Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias (1996), edited by Drs A. Peter Klimley and David G. Ainley, shark experts Drs Michael D. Gottfried, Leonard J.V. Compagno, and S. Curtis Bowman suggested on the basis of the previously-mentioned vertebral column’s dimensions and other megalodon remains that in order to support its substantial dentition, the megalodon’s jaws would have been “somewhat more robust, larger, and thicker, and with correspondingly more massive muscles to operate them” than those of the great white shark. In overall appearance, they proposed that the megalodon “would likely have had a streamlined, fusiform shape similar to, but more robust than, the [great] white shark and other lamnids, with more bulging jaws and a broader, blunter, and relatively more massive head”.

If this reconstruction is accurate, might it explain the Greys’ comments about the massive or square-shaped head of their respective giant mystery sharks? Moreover, it is believed that the fins of the megalodon were proportional to its larger size, and hence were bigger than those of the great white. Could this therefore explain the huge pectoral fins sported by the giant mystery shark sighted by Zane Grey?

Once believed to be an exclusively near-surface, continental shelf dweller in tropical and subtropical seas, the megalodon is now thought to have been sufficiently adaptable to have inhabited a wide range of environments, from shallow coastal waters and swampy coastal lagoons to sandy littorals and offshore deepwater abodes, exhibiting a transient lifestyle, and of near-cosmopolitan geographical distribution. Adult specimens, however, were not common in shallow-water habitats (thus explaining the relative rarity of modern-day Lord of the Deep and other super-sized great white lookalike sightings?), and mostly lurked offshore, but may have moved between coastal and oceanic habitats during different stages of the life cycle.

The megalodon first appeared in the fossil record around 16 million years ago during the mid-Miocene, and was undoubtedly one of the most formidable marine predators of all time. So why, according to mainstream zoology, did it become extinct (if, indeed, it did!)? As yet, there is no definitive answer to this key question. However, the cooling of the oceans that occurred during the late Pliocene and Pleistocene in conjunction with the Ice Ages (an occurrence not conducive to the megalodon’s survival, as it favoured warmer, tropical waters), coupled with the resulting migration towards colder, high-latitude regions by the larger whales that constituted its preferred prey (megalodon tooth marks on the fossil bones of such cetaceans are well documented), is the scenario most favoured as the cause of this giant shark’s apparent extinction. Also, during the Ice Ages a substantial volume of seawater became locked inside continental ice sheets, thereby resulting in a significant worldwide fall in sea levels, which is something else that was not compatible with megalodon survival, restricting the number of nursery sites available for its juveniles’ safe maturation.

Yet in view of how adaptable the megalodon was in terms of the variety of marine environments that it could inhabit, might it have once again been sufficiently adaptable to withstand these changes? True, the fossil record does not contain ample evidence of its survival in regions where water temperatures had significantly declined during the Pliocene. Then again, as pointed out by Gottfried et al., this species may have existed in environments “…that have gone unrecognized due to preservational and/or collecting biases” – a significant but all-too-often ignored or neglected factor when making assumptions based upon the known fossil record.

Also, in view of the several exceedingly large whale species existing then, and still today (the whale hunting industry’s depredations notwithstanding), the megalodon would not be short of suitable prey (big cetaceans, along with pinnipeds and fish too, are believed to have constituted its preferred diet). And what if, like the huge carnivorous sperm whale, it also sought out sizeable deepwater species such as giant squids, common in tropical as well as temperate seas, but for which, as is often true from deepwater habitats, there would be little if any readily available confirmation from the fossil record?

Even if faced with competition from today’s largest carnivorous cetaceans, might there still be enough suitable prey out there in the vast oceans to sustain a viable megalodon population? After all, even large migratory whales like the blue whale and grey whale still spend part of their year in sub-tropical waters; and during those periods that these cetaceans spend in more polar zones, megalodons could subsist instead upon big fishes like the basking shark, whale shark, and abundant smaller species existing in sizeable shoals, plus giant squids.

Irrespective of the precise reason(s) why it died out, the findings of a 2014 study by American researchers Drs Catalina Pimiento and Christopher F. Clements (published by the journal PLoS ONE) suggest that the megalodon most likely did so approximately 2.6 million years ago, during the late Pliocene (a few have opined that it may have persisted into the early Pleistocene). However, these dates fail to take into account a dramatic, highly controversial revelation that occurred at the close of the 1950s. Back in 1875, the British oceanographic survey vessel H.M.S.Challenger had hauled up two megalodon teeth from the manganese dioxide-rich red clay deposit at a depth of 14,000 ft on the sea bed south of Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean. When, in 1959, these teeth were dated by Russian scientist Dr Wladimir Tschernezky, the scientific world received a considerable shock. Knowing the rate of formation of the manganese dioxide layer covering them, he had measured the thickness of the layer – and from the results that he had obtained, he announced in a paper published on 24 October 1959 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that one of the teeth was only 24,000 years old, and the other was a mere 11,000 years old.

In short, ifTschernezky’s results were accurate, the megalodon shark was still alive at the end of the Pleistocene epoch 11,700 years ago. And if this is true, it would again lend credibility to speculation among some cryptozoologists that this incredible species may still be alive today. It is nothing if not intriguing, incidentally, that these two enigmatic teeth were obtained in much the same (Tahitian) locality as that of the giant sharks respectively encountered by the Greys. Just a coincidence?

HMS Challenger, 1858 engraving (public domain)

Having said that, there remains much contention among current ichthyologists and palaeontologists regarding Tschernezky’s results. The main argument against them is that the teeth may have originally been reworked from older strata, as has been discussed earlier in this present book with respect to various alleged post-Mesozoic dinosaur and plesiosaur fossils. Also, there can be considerable variation in results obtained for the dating of manganese dioxide deposits, depending upon whether maximum or minimum deposition rates for them are being used, and such deposits also vary in relation to a number of fluctuating external factors such as the concentration in seawater of iron ions and photosynthesising plankton. Whether such variations can be so extreme as to yield a date as recent as only 11,000 years ago as opposed to one of at least 2.6 million years ago, conversely, has yet to be confirmed.

Also worthy of note here is the following statement from the earlier-cited paper by Pimiento and Clements:

In a very small proportion of simulations (1.5%), the inferred date of extinction fell after 0.1 Ma. In six simulations (0.06%) the inferred date of extinction fell after the present day (and thus the species could not be considered as extinct). However, because in the vast majority of the 10,000 simulations (>99.9%) the extinction time was inferred to have occurred before the present day, we reject the null hypothesis (that the species is extant) and the popular claims of present day survival of C. megalodon.

In short, although too small in number to be considered statistically significant, from the vast array of fossil samples utilised in their simulations a few modern-day inferred extinction dates did occur, as well as some with an inferred extinction date of under 100,000 years. How can these be explained and which specific samples were responsible, I wonder?

All in all, if they still exist it would be very interesting to see those two teeth that were dated so contentiously by Tschernezky back in the late 1950s subjected now to modern-day dating techniques. The most common method for Quaternary (Pleistocene and Holocene) remains – which these teeth would be if Tschernezky’s age estimates for them of 24,000 and 11,000 years respectively are correct – is radiocarbon (carbon-14) dating, but it generally cannot date specimens older than around 60,000 years. However, a more recent and potentially much more useful technique, which has already been proved to be effective with fossil teeth, is electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR).

As noted in a 14 February 2014 Spectroscopy Europe online paper authored by Dr Mathieu Duval from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain, optimum time range application for EPR dating of tooth enamel lies between c.50,000 years and c.800,000 years. Moreover, in some specific conditions, the real time-range limits for EPR dating may be potentially pushed from present-day to around 2–3 million years. This means that EPR dating not only could demonstrate unequivocally whether Tschernezky’s unexpectedly recent age estimates for these two very contentious megalodon teeth were correct, but also might still be able to provide an age for them even if they actually do date back to the time of the megalodon’s official demise, i.e. approximately 2.6 million years ago – something that radiocarbon dating could not achieve.

A white fossil megalodon tooth (public domain)

One final comment regarding giant, ostensibly anachronistic shark teeth: in his authoritative work The Fishes of Australia Part 1: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-Fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand (1940), Gilbert P. Whitley, then Curator of Fishes at the Natural History Museum in Sydney, Australia, stated:

Fresh-looking [megalodon] teeth measuring 4 by 3 1/4 inches have been dredged from the sea floor, which indicates that if not actually still living, this gigantic species must have become extinct within a recent period.

Unfortunately, he didn’t provide further details concerning these bold claims. Fossil megalodon teeth are generally black or grey, less commonly brown and even gold, but white specimens are also known – and although they too are fossilised, these latter ones can look deceptively recent in appearance, so Whitley may have been mistaken. As for the teeth noted by him, sadly I have no knowledge of where they currently reside.

In summary: Dr Stead considered that the shark responsible for towing away the fishermens’ lobster pots could have been a living megalodon, but just how likely is this terrifying prospect? I am well aware that by virtue of its very nature, the megalodon must surely appear to be one of this book’s least likely creatures to survive in the present day. Having said that: if, as noted here, this monstrous carnivorous shark dined upon large whales, pinnipeds, fishes, and (especially) giant squids, moving up and down through the sea depths in search of its varied prey, its huge food requirements could surely be met. And if, as predicted from palaeontological studies, it only occasionally entered the oceans’ surface waters as an adult, this might explain how in spite of its great size it has succeeded in eluding science, and why even fishermen in its general area of distribution only rarely catch sight of it.

Certainly, as someone who in 2008 flew from Santiago in Chile to Easter Island and, in so doing, spent no less than 4 hours travelling continuously across a seemingly limitless blue expanse of water with never so much as the tiniest speck of land in sight, yet knowing full well that this was in reality only a minute portion of the Pacific’s full mid-oceanic extent, I feel qualified to offer the opinion that in such an unimaginably vast yet (for the greater part) only sparsely visited expanse of water relatively speaking, even creatures as huge as megalodons could surely exist just beneath the surface without ever being seen by humans for much if not all of their life. Here they could readily avoid the occasional cruiser or other sizeable sea vessel crossing the immense mid-ocean stretches of water upon which the various Pacific island groups are scattered like mere confetti, and only occasionally approach the shores of such islands where they may conceivably attract brief attention before travelling back out to the open seas once more.

We know that in Pliocene times megalodons occurred in coastal waters (albeit only rarely as adults), because the fossil record tells us so. But what if megalodons also lived in mid-oceanic stretches where any dead specimens either were consumed by other marine carnivores or became fossilised in locations where such remains can never be uncovered, such as the sea bottom – except, possibly, for a few anachronistic teeth dredged up by a research vessel?

And even if such a creature is spied once in a while when far out to sea, by some ocean-going tourists or bold fishermen venturing further out than usual from their coastal zone, what will they see? Just a triangular dorsal fin resembling a slightly larger-than-normal great white’s, cutting silently through the water? Who would think to report that as anything special?

However, one could also argue that if the megalodon has indeed survived into the modern day, why was it not reported by whalers during the whaling age? Great white sharks were frequently attracted to harpooned, massively-bleeding whales, sometimes causing problems for whalers trying to land these huge, dying sea mammals or their carcases. How much greater a problem, therefore, would megalodons have posed? Yet I am not aware of any whaling records describing encounters with sharks that might have been megalodons.

As for smaller, juvenile megalodons, surely these would be hooked or entangled in netting from time to time, just like similar-sized adult great whites are? Yet again, however, there do not appear to be records of this, unless any such juveniles that may have been caught looked similar enough to adult great whites for anglers not to have considered them worthy of being brought to zoological attention?

Also, if the megalodon still exists there would surely be big whales out there that have survived a megalodon attack yet carry the scars created by such a monster’s huge teeth, but again I am unaware of any records of this. Then again, any whale surviving a megalodon attack would need to be very big indeed, and such individuals probably remain far out of sight in the open oceans, and those not surviving such an attack would be devoured by the victorious megalodon, with any remains simply sinking to the ocean floor.

Yet another anomaly if the megalodon is indeed still alive today is why no modern-day megalodon teeth have ever been found, bearing in mind that sharks shed numerous teeth every year, and that assemblages of shark teeth from other species have been procured from the sea floor. Then again, perhaps some modern megalodon teeth have been obtained, but, in view of how sought-after their fossil equivalents are by collectors (and expensive too!), have simply not been publicly revealed.

Having said all of this, there is a notable modern-day precedent for large sharks remaining hidden from science. In November 1976, a major new species of very large shark was accidentally captured by a research vessel anchored off the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Attempting to swallow one of the ship’s parachute anchors, it had choked to death, despite its enormous mouth, which swiftly earned its species a very appropriate name – the megamouth shark Megachasma pelagios. Measuring up to 18 ft long, this very distinctive species has since been recorded from waters all around the world, and observations of living specimens fitted with tracking devices have revealed that it undergoes vertical migration – staying in the depths of the sea during the day, and rising to the surface only at night. This explains how such a large and widely-distributed shark species had successfully managed to evade scientific detection until as late a date as 1976.

In fact, a megamouth – or some other very large, formally undescribed species of deepwater shark – may actually have been seen and photographed by a scientific team a full 10 years earlier. On 15 August 1966, the San Mateo Times, a Californian newspaper, carried the following very intriguing report:

Undersea cameras of the Scripps Institute of Oceanogra­phy have photographed a colossal shark-like fish that is unfa­miliar and may prefer living in the darkest depths of the Pacific.

Scripps’ Dr. John D. Isaacs, speaking at a weekend confer­ence, estimated the fish at 15-20 feet in length and three to six feet thick at its widest.

The species could not be determined, he said, because of the unmanned camera’s limited field which only allowed pictur­ing the fish’s gills and pectoral fin.

“It is probably a shark, but a shark the likes of which we have never seen before,” he said. The fish was photographed at a depth of 6,OOO feet off San Clemente Island, which is about 75 miles south of Los Angeles.

Since the first megamouth was caught off Oahu in 1976, several have been washed ashore or documented in waters off California, lending further support to the possibility that the Scripps’s mystery shark was a specimen of this very big species – always assuming, of course, that it wasn’t a juvenile megalodon…?

Incidentally, crypto-sceptics have suggested that the megalodon could not exist as a deepwater species because it would require all manner of morphological specialisations, but in view of the fact that the only physical remains that we have of it are teeth and vertebrae, how can anyone say with certainty that it didn’t – or doesn’t – possess any such specialisations?

Bearing in mind, therefore, that a mere 40 years ago the megamouth was still unseen and undiscovered by science, the prospect for prehistoric persistence of the megalodon cannot be entirely denied out of hand – however much we may wish to banish from our minds the disturbing image of a rapacious, flesh-eating shark at least twice the size of the current record-holder for the great white, cruising anonymously beneath the surface of the Pacific in the 21st Century.

Last – and least – of all but requiring a mention here if only because of how much confusion it caused (and still causes) among viewers not well-versed in cryptozoology is the infamous ‘mockumentary’/’docufiction’ Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, which was first aired on the American TV network Discovery Channel in 2013, concerning the alleged modern-day survival of this giant shark species. The programme has an entry on Wikipedia that summarises its history very succinctly as follows:

The story, with only short disclaimers at the beginning and ending indicating that it is fictional, revolves around the loss of a pleasure boat and crew off the coast of South Africa and an ensuing investigation that points to an attack by a member of the species megalodon, a prehistoric shark thought to be long extinct. Its format is that of a documentary that includes accounts of “professionals” in various fields related to Megalodon. It follows a similar format to another docufictionaired by Discovery Channel, Mermaids: The Body Found.

The show, like Mermaids, came under equal criticism and scrutiny by both scientists and ordinary viewers due to the attempt to present fiction as a non-fiction documentary. Despite the disclaimers, some people actually believed they were watching a real documentary while others were offended that a docufictionshow would be aired on a channel that had been known for true science shows. It should also be noted [that], unlike Mermaids, the disclaimers were barely even present, in addition to the talk show that was strongly saying and asking if people believed what was presented in Megalodonshowed that the species was still alive. This misinformation likely caused the mass misconception that the shark species was still alive.

No it didn’t – speculation on this subject was rife long before the programme was produced. As for whether the modern-day existence of the megalodon actually is – or is not – a misconception, this has already been discussed soberly and at length in the present section of this book. In my opinion, however, any attempt to do so in an equally rational, objective manner elsewhere is always likely to be overshadowed nowadays by the Discovery mockumentary’s unhelpful contribution to the subject, which is a tragedy for those seeking to bestow gravitas and credibility upon serious cryptozoological debate.

Spread the Fear:

Welcome to the Search for Cryptids!

Many creatures lurk in the wild, often seen but never captured, giving birth to legend and myth. The beasts of cryptozoology have haunted man's imagination for centuries, leading him on a mad chase to prove once and for all that these fanciful freaks of nature live among us still...

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